°"°''A * - -su^ « *^i,??i:^»« .o o "^^(^ ' O 4P< ^"'^'^Kf ^o^ ._ O .6^*^ys. o A* •V' s.V^ NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE -^7^ u NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE Studies^ Social and Topographical, of the Towti wider Dutch and-Rarly E?iglish Rule BY J. H. INNES WITH MAPS, PLANS, VIKVVS, ETC, Maar gij, 6 wel, en alder-hf erlijks>t-Ldii.J, Weest daakbaar, an dts mi'Jcn Gevers hand. Die u als in een Lusc-hof hceft geplunt. Die gij u kJnd'ren Mviugt laten tot ten Ecuwig-eygendom, Tot dat hec Zaad der Vrouvve wcderotn Vcrschijn: tot ons verlosaing : Wcilckom! Wie zal 't hdin hina'itn? Jacob SxEtNUAM NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1902 f^ (^ % Copyriq/i!, Tgo2, Bv Chaki 1.S Sckiunlr's Sons Publishn.1, October, i(y02 A,. ? UNIVERSITY PRi:SS • )OHt.' VVII.SOH AND SON • CAMBRIUCi:, U.S.A. PREFACE IT is perhaps unfortunate, in some respects, that Washing- ton Irving chose to employ his great talents in writing the amusing " Knickerbocker History " of New York. A burlesque history of New York does not seem to be called for per se, any more than a burlesque history of the Plymouth Colony, and the presentation of a fictitious type of the colo- nists of the former is calculated to work the same sort of inconveniences as would the selection, for example, of Colonel Pride or of Praise-God Barebones as a type of the latter. Readers of such works are supposed, it is true, to bear in mind the fact that they are considering the humorous descrip- tions of non-existent characters ; but when for any reason the work becomes almost a classic, as it were, of the literature of the country, the type therein portrayed passes insensibly in the popular mind into something like the embodiment of truth. The superficial American who travels in England, or the superficial Englishman who travels in America, when he writes a book about his travels, is apt to set forth the few people he has chanced to meet as representatives of national types of character. Both of these worthies are even more prone to do the same thing when they travel in a foreign country with the tongue of which they are of necessity but imperfectly acquainted, but in such cases their performances usually fall beneath the dignity of criticism. No community, however, can be rightly judged in this manner, for in each one are to be found traits of character almost as diverse and distinct as are the individuals who compose it. New York is no exception to this rule. Within vi PREFACE the period of the first thirty or forty years of the colonization of New Amsterdam there are to be met with, in the town, representatives of every country of Europe west of the line of the Slavonic peoples. The Dutch, of course, greatly predom- inated, but their characteristics also are exceedingly varied. In the public and private records of the colony there are to be found traits of profound and of thoughtless men, men crafty and men open-minded, mild or haughty, religious or profane, moral or immoral, learned or ignorant, freedom-loving or despotic, small-minded men in office, puffed up with notions of their boundless importance, men of shrewd business ca- pacity, and reckless speculators, — all very much as may be found upon the island of Manhattan in this year of grace nineteen hundred and two. About the only type which the author has been unable to meet with in his researches is the dunder-headed Dutchman of fictitious history and of his- torical fiction, — the embodiment of the popular idea of the Dutch phlegmatic temperament; a marvellous compound of Captain Bunsby and the Fat Boy in Pickwick. At a later period Mr. D. T. Valentine began the first really earnest and systematic attempt to bring out the actual features of the old Dutch establishment. The labors of this gen- tleman were severe, though not very methodical, and he is entitled to great credit for the mass of materials which he has brought together out of their original obscurity. Mr. Valen- tine, however, was not very well acquainted with the Dutch language, and, worse than that, he was peculiarly prone to giving fanciful explanations to imperfectly understood facts. These sometimes led to the most extraordinary and absurd conclusions. Thus, for example, when some years after the surrender to the English, the ferry-master at Haarlem discov- ered that he was being deprived of his legitimate fees by a practice which had grown up among the drovers of driving their horses and cattle through the woods to a ford across the narrow Spuyten Duyvil Creek, near the present King's Bridge, and there wading across at certain stages of the tide, he applied for permission to erect a tavern at this spot for the PEEFACE vii purpose of watching the wading-place. Mr. Valentine appears to have found a portion of the record granting the ferry- master the privilege of establishing the tavern at what is designated by the illiterate scribe as " the wedding-place," Thereupon Mr, Valentine has given a romantic account, to the effect that tliis paltry tavern, in its lonely and then almost inaccessible location in the wilderness, received its name from being the favorite resort of wedding parties from New Amsterdam. Again, in the case of Gerrit Hendricksen, who was famil- iarly called — in all probability from some peculiarity of his person or habitual dress — " de blauw boer,'^ literally, the blue boor or farmer, Mr. Valentine, having found certain deeds in which the property is described as adjoining "de blauw boer," has in some inexplicable manner translated the phrase as " The Blue Boar,'' and (perhaps with visions of the Boar's Head in Eastcheap in his mind) has gravely stated that the premises referred to were occupied as a tavern with the sign of the Blue Boar. Many other examples of Mr. Valentine's inaccuracies might be given, but the foregoing will suffice. They seem to have been very carefully followed in many instances by subsequent writers whose accounts are based upon his researches. Even in the case of so graceful a writer as the author of the " Tour around New York," his work is marred by numerous errors whenever he quits the domain of personal reminiscences. Since, then, Washington Irving has described New Amster- dam, not as it was ; and since Mr. Valentine has described it, in many respects as it was not, there seemed to be some room for an attempt to extract from the original records something which should more closely represent the actual conditions existing in the Dutch town, — whence the present essay. The work is mainly based upon topographical researches, the dangerous field of family genealogy having been avoided by the author as far as possible, except where it seemed necessary to introduce genealogical matter in order to eluci- date various portions of the text. viii PREFACE The especial acknowledgments of the author are due to Mr. W. Eames, Librarian of the Lenox Library, for many favors in the prosecution of his researches, and more particu- larly for placing at his service the extensive and very valuable Bancker Collection, so-called, of plans and surveys, in the possession of the Library. These, though only of indirect benefit to the author in the present work, are invaluable to the student of the topography of New York in the later Colonial period. So, too, the especial thanks of the author are owing to his friend, Mr. A. J. F. van Laer, Librarian of the Manuscript Department of the State Library at Albany, for the unwearied patience and courtesy with which he has met the author's somewhat large calls upon his time and attention, and for the valuable information received from him upon many points. The enthusiastic interest which this gentleman has shown in the history and antiquities of the offshoot from his native country, which, planted upon the island of Manhattan in the early portion of the seventeenth century, has grown from feeble beginnings till it is threatening to rob London itself of the municipal pre-eminence of the world, cannot but be grat- ifying to a native New York student of the history of the latter metropolis. J. H. I. CONTENTS CHAPTER I Page Early Growth ok the Settlement. — The Common Pasture Field. — Brugh Straet and Brouwer Straet. — Philip Geraerdy and the White Horse Tavern 1 CHAPTER II WiNCKEL Straet, and the House of Dominie Bogardus. — The West India Company's Old Storehouse. — Schreyers Hoek 13 CHAPTER III The West India Company and its Colonial Officers. — The Quarrel between Director Kieft and Dominie Bogardus. — The Wreck of the "Princess" 21 CHAPTER IV "The Five Stone Houses." —The Brugh Steegh, or Bridge Lane. — The Brewery of the West India Company. — PlETER CORNELISSEN AND HIS GARDEN. — HeNDRICK KiP, The Tailor 31 CHAPTER V Hendrick Kip and his House. — The Kip Cottages on Stone Street. — Jan Jansen van St. Obin and the Slave Ship "Gideon" 38 CHAPTER VI The Water-side. — Dr. Hans Kiersted. — The Houses of CORNELIS VAN StEENWYCK AND JOHANNES NeVIUS. — CaP- tain Paulus Vandergrift. — The New Storehouse of the West India Company. — The Warehouse of Augus- tyn Heermans. — Secretary Van Tienhoven. — The Old Church and Parsonage 45 CONTENTS CHAPTER VII Page Adam Roelantsen, the First Schoolmaster in New Amster- dam, AND HIS House on Stone Street. — Captain Willem TOMASSEN 61 CHAPTER VIII Surgeon Van der Bogaerdt and his House. — His Tragical Death. — The Privateer "La Garce" and her Prizes. — Isaac de Foreest 68 CHAPTER IX The Van Cortlandt Homestead. — Catherine van Cort- landt and her Church at Sleepy Hollow. — Van Couwen- hoven's Houses on Stone Street. — Pieter Hartgers, THE Wampum Commissioner 75 CHAPTER X The "Ditch," or Graft. — Teunis Craie and his Houses on THE Ditch. — The Jews in New Amsterdam. — Solomon La Chair, the Notary, and his Tavern. — The Banish- ment OF MiCHIEL PiCQUET 81 CHAPTER XI CoRNELis Melyn, Patroon OF Staten Island. — The Indian Troubles. — Jochem Pietersen Kuyter. — The Struggles OF Melyn and Kuyter against the Colonial Authorities. — The Baron Van der Capellen. — Sibout Claesen, of HOORN 94 CHAPTER XII Jacob Steendam, the Dutch Poet, and his House. — His Poetical Works. — "Den Distelvink." — Poems on New Netherland. — His Latter Years at Batavia .... 127 CHAPTER XIII Jacob van Couwenhoven and his Brewery. — Prinse Straet, and "The Gardens." — Slyck Steegh, or Mill Lane. — The Bark Mill. — Dominie Michaelis and the First Dutch Church. — Evert Duyckink 144 CONTENTS xi CHAPTER XIV Page The Houses of Barent Jansen, Jan Nagel, Claes Carsten- SEN, AND JOCHEM C ALDER. — PlETER AnDRIKSSEN AND HIS Troubles with the Indians. — Nicholas de Meyer. — Wessel Evertsen, the Fisherman. — Rut Jacobsen . . 161 CHAPTER XV The "Great Tavern," afterwards the Town Hall. — Its Historical and Political Associations. — Dominie BoGARDUs's Party. — The Courts. — The Shirt Case. — Governor Lovelace's Tavern 175 CHAPTER XVI The "English Quarter," and the Grants to Thomas Willet and to Richard Smith. — William Paterson, THE Scotchman, and his Adventures. — Who was he? — An Historical Problem 192 CHAPTER XVII Hanover Square and Burger's Path. — Burger Jorissen, the Smith. — The Thirty Years' War. — Hendrick Jan- sen, the Tailor, and his Opinion of Director Kieft. — Smith Street 223 CHAPTER XVIII Govert Loockermans and his Family. — Elsie Leisler. — The Loockermans' House and its Associations. — Captain Kidd 235 CHAPTER XIX Sergeant Daniel Litscho and his Tavern. — Andries Joch- EMSEN. — The "Outhoek." — Wall Street and the Palisades of 1653. — Tymen Jansen, the Ship Carpenter, and his House 267 CHAPTER XX The Smits Vly. — Hendrick Jansen's Grant. — Augustyn Heermans and his House. — Maryn Adriaensen and his Attack on Director Kieft 279 xii CONTENTS CHAPTER XXI Page The Maagde Paetje, or Maiden Lane. — Skipper Cornelis- SEN. — Frederik Lubbertsen and his House. — Jan and Mary Peeck. — Sander Leendertsen's House. — Jan ViNJE, THE First White Child born in New Nether- land. — Vinje's Brewery 236 CHAPTER XXII Secretary Van Tienhoven's Bouwery of " Wallenstein." — The Gouwenberg. — Van Tienhoven's Lane. — The Vanderclyff Family 309 CHAPTER XXIII The Hamlet at the Ferry. — Lambert Moll. — Hage Bruynsen, the Swede. — Dirck Volckertsen and his Brother-in-Law, Abraham Verplanck. — Thomas Hall's Place 313 CHAPTER XXIV The Town's End and Bestevaers Kreupelbosch. — Isaac Allerton and his Warehouse. — Loockermans' Farm. — The Ferry. — Harry Brazier's House. — Dirck, the Potter 329 APPENDIX I The Justus Danckers View of New Amsterdam .... 347 APPENDIX II The Descendants of Cornelis Melyn 350 INDEX 357 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS View of New Amsterdam about 1650 Frontispiece (Reversed from a copy of the etching of Justus Danckers' Amster- dam, ill the author's possession.) Plan of New Amsterdam about 1644 To face page 1 New Amsterdam about 1630 " 2 (From the View in Hartgers' " Beschrijvingh van Virginia," Lenox Library, New York City.) Schreyers Hoek Toren, Amsterdam " 18 (From Wagenaar's " Amsterdam.") The West India Company's House, Amsterdam . . " 22 (From a print of 1693.) The West India Company's Warehouse " 24 (From a print in the author's possession.) Plan of the Ground between Brugh Straet and the East River, New Amsterdam, in 1655 .... " 44 Cornelis van Steenwyck " 48 (From the portrait in Manual of the New York Common Coun- cil, 1864.) View of the Marckveldt and 't Water, 1652 ... " 58 (Enlarged from the Justus Danckers and Visscher Views of New Amsterdam.) Plan of Brouwer Straet and Hoogh Straet from Fort Amsterdam to the Stadt Huys " 80 View of the East River Shore in the vicinity of the "Graft," 1652 ** 104 (Enlarged from the Justus Danckers and Visscher Views of New Amsterdam.) The Heere Graft, Amsterdam, 1795 " 122 (From an aquatint engraving in Ireland's " Tour through Hol- land.") View of the Southeast Corner of Broad and Stone Streets " 124 xiv LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Jacob Steendam — The Kooman Portrait . . To face page 130 (From a print in the Lenox Library, New York.) South William Street — The Ancient Slyck Steegh . "150 View of the Oude Kerk, or Old Church, Amsterdam . " 156 (From Wagenaar's "Amsterdam.") Stone Street " 170 The Old Stadts Herbergh, or City Tavern, Amsterdam " 176 (From Wagenaar's " Amsterdam.") Plan of the Stadt Huys, or Town Hall of New Am- sterdam " 178 The Stadts Herbergh and vicinity, 1652 "182 (Enlarged from the Justus Danckers and Visscher Views of New Amsterdam.) The Stadt Huys and Burgers Path, 1679 " 188 (From the Danker and Sluyter View, Memoirs L. L Historical Society.) Coenties Alley " 192 Portrait of William Paterson " 206 (From a Wash drawing in the British Museum.) View of Old Slip " 222 Hanover Square " 224 Plan of New Amsterdam, from the Stadt Huys to the Town Palisades, 1655 " 240 North Side of Wall Street " 272 Plan of New Amsterdam, from the Palisades to the Ferry, 1655 " 278 Augustyn Heermans " 282 (From the Portrait b}' himself on his Map of Maryland, British Museum.) Looking up Maiden Lane from Pearl Street . ... " 296 View of Gold Street " 298 Intersection of John and Pearl Streets " 310 A Part of Van Tienhoven's Lane, 1902 "312 "The Swamp," 1902 "326 AUerton's Warehouse and the Old Ferry, 1679 . . " 336 (From the Danker and Sluyter View.) NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE NEW AMSTERDA AND ITS PEOPLE CHAPTER I EARLY GROWTH OF THE SETTLEMENT. — THE COMMON PASTURE FIELD. —BRUGH STRAET AND BROUWER STRAET. — PHILIP GERAERDY AND THE WHITE HORSE TAVERN Nor you, ye proud, impute to these the fault. If mem'ry o'er their tomb uo trophies raise, Where through the loug-drawn aisle and fretted vault The pealing anthem swells the note of praise. Gray. THE city of New York has been fortunate in the pres- ervation of the early records of its settlement. The study of the beginnings of the great centres of population of the world possesses a peculiar interest for many, but the early history of some of these cities, such as Rome, London, and Paris, is lost in the obscurity of ages long past ; while others, such as St. Petersburg, and, to a certain extent, Berlin, built in pursuance of a rigid, pre-arranged plan of the governmental powers, possess no more of antiquarian interest than does the growth of New York under the Commissioners' plan of 1807. In New Amsterdam, however, the early growth of the town was not only in accordance with the process of natural accre- tion, but it was made under the auspices of the West India Company, a private corporation, which kept a rather jealous eye upon its officials and its colonists, and maintained a con- stant intercommunication with them, by means of reports, letters of instruction, and a system of records of even the most trivial transactions. These documents, though most of 1 2 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE the very earliest of tliem are supposed to have perished, are quite complete and full from the year 1638, and from them it is possible to gain a comprehensive view of New Amsterdam at almost any subsequent period during the Dutch rule. The early course of building at the new settlement is pretty well known. The original log blockhouse, with its surround- ing palisades, undoubtedly occupied a part of the site of the later Fort Amsterdam ; that is to say, it stood within the space embraced by the present Bowling Green, Whitehall, Bridge, and State streets. Clustering around this structure were the small cabins of the first settlers, most of whom were mere Indian traders. Many of these cabins were doubtless de- stroyed soon after the larger fortifications were " staked out," as it is expressed in a letter of 1626. The remainder of the thirty dwelling-houses which had been built before the close of that year were apparently scattered in the vicinity of the blockhouse, in such positions as had been chosen by the builders, no system of streets existing as yet, and the houses possibly not being considered as permanent. Afterwards, in a few instances these earhest settlers received grants of the plots which they had thus pre-empted, in this way causing some irregularity and inconvenience in the ground-plan sub- sequently adopted.^ These early cabins are said to have been " of bark." They were probably duly framed of hewn timber, but owing to the lack of saw-mills at this time had been covered, after the fashion of shingling, with the thick bark of the chestnut or of other suitable forest trees. The roofs were all thatched with the native reeds.^ ^ See, however, the remarks in note, post, page 33, as to the indications of a system of streets ; or rather lanes, earlier than that finally adopted. 2 It is the writer's opinion that the very valuable engraved view of New Am- sterdam, usually spoken of as the " Hartgers view," which is su))posed to be the earliest one extant of the settlement, is to be referred to the period above spoken of in the text, and may be fixed with comparative certainty to some time between the years 1628 and 1632, a date considerably earlier than is usually as- scribed to it. A slight examination of tiiis view by any person acquainted with the early topography of New Amsterdam \vU\ show that it is a reversed one, and as such must, in all probability, have been taken by means of a plain camera obscura, — no doubt from some point on the Long Island shore, — and 5 <1 &p THE COMPANY'S BOUWERYS 3 Soon after the first body of agricultural settlers sent over by the West India Company had arrived, at about the period last mentioned, and after the Director, Peter Minuit, had efifected the purchase of Manhattan Island from the Indians, a body of negro slaves belonging to the Company was set to work clearing a large space of ground east of the present Bowery, and extending from a fresh-water swamp occup}^- ing the site of the present Roosevelt and James streets to Eighteenth or Twentieth Street. This tract was divided into six " bouwerys " or farms, which, with the buildings erected upon them by the West India Company, and with certain stock furnished by that body, were leased to various tenants. In addition to these farms, several clearings were begun by individuals, who were promised grants of land on favorable never restored to its true position. The correct view appears by simply holding a mirror to the reversed one. Having been obtained by this method, it is evident that the sketch must approach accuracy in its main details, subject, of course, to some impairment owing to the small scale upon which the picture is drawn. Examining it, now, closely, we find one of its principal features to be a row of stepped gables running parallel with the east side of the fort, and belonging to some buildings of more than ordinary size. These can be none other than the Company's "Stone Houses" upon Wiuckel Straet. Between them and the river shore no sign appears of the church, erected in 1633. A small cluster of cottages is seen upon the westerly side of the Broad Street swamp and its ditch ; another group near the inter.section of the present Beaver Street and Broadway ; and a few more near the windmill upon the North River shore. The buildings shown number about thirty or thirty-five. Upon the East River shore is shown the bluff, just west of which the City Tavern was erected in 1641 ; a thicket or grove upon its summit undoubtedly conceals from view a building of much interest, the old bark mill, in its isolated location east of the swamp or Blommaert's VI3', in the loft of wliich building the first church services were held. Most of these localities will be treated of more in detail in the text. As for the matter which seems to have .somewhat puzzled Mr. G. M. Asher in his " Essay on the Books and Pamphlets relating to New Netherland," — that no buildings are shown within the fort, the answer is that none were as yet built there ; and the main design of the view is evidently to show the newly planned fortification, as oriqi- naUy contemplated, for it will be noticed that the walls show embrasures, which, as far as we are informed, never existed there, the structure as finished being merely a sodded earthwork, upon which the guns were mounted en barbette. There is also a fifth bastion shown, upon the south side of the fort, of M'hich no mention is made in the records or in maps. It is not at all improbable that this view was originally annexed to a plan, or report of the engineer, to the West India Company. 4 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE terms by the Company; while to aid in providing for the maintenance of its officials and servants of various degrees, the West India Company caused to be cleared and placed under cultivation the tract extending from Fulton to Cham- bers Street, and from Broadway to the North River, well known at first as the " Company's Bouwery ; " then, after the surrender, in 1664, as the "Duke's Farm," and the " King's Farm," by virtue of its confiscation to the Crown ; and later as the " Cliurcli Farm," the property of Trinity Church. The cleared land upon all these bouwerys, however, was immediately taken up for the cultivation of tobacco or grain, and no suitable pasture was found for the cattle. To remedy this, the Company cleared in part, and enclosed for a common pasture field, a tract of twenty -five or thirty acres, extending from the west side of Broadway to the present Nassau and Chatham streets, and from the line of Ann Street up to a small pond known as the " Little Kolck," near the present Duane Street.^ To this pasture field and to the Company's Farm a road extended from the fort, along the present Broad- way, then turning eastward and again northward, it skirted the common pasture field, following the lines of the present Ann, Nassau, and Chatham streets as far as a point about at tlie junction of North William and Chatham streets, where it deviated to the eastward for the purpose of going around the high ground known as Catiemut's Hill (this portion of the road has long been closed), after which it passed along the present Chatham Square and the Bowery, giving access to the farms already mentioned. After the lapse of many years, when the enclosure spoken of was no longer used for a com- mon pasture, and when the fences had been removed, the road naturally struck a diagonal line across the open space, thus marking out the present Park Row. The earlier route, as above mentioned, however, was in all probability the first ^ There was, however, a temporary pasturage enclosure laid out at the time of the arrival of the first agricultural colonists. This, the well-kuowu Schaapen Weide, or Sheep Pasture, south of Wall Street, will be spoken of hereafter. FIRST SAW-J\IILL 5 road of any considerable length on Manhattan Island,^ ante- dating by several years the river road along the upper portion of the present Pearl Street. Soon after 1626, the machinery for a saw-mill arrived from Holland. This mill, worked by wind-power, after the Holland fashion, was erected on the shore of Nutten, now Governor's Island, — a situation which will seem the less singular if one calls to mind not only the facilities for floating logs to the spot from the neighboring shores, but also the hundred acres and more on the island itself, overgrown with the forest of chestnut, oak, and hickory trees which had given the island its name. With the advent of this mill, of course, the build- ings of New Amsterdam began to assume a more finished appearance. Within a few years after 1633 they had extended easterly along the north side of Pearl Street (which here ran nearly along the shore of the river) almost as far as the pres- ent Broad Street, where at this time the tide ebbed and flowed through a small salt-water creek which received the drainage of a considerable area of wet land lying a short distance back from the river. Here a bridge was built, which afforded access to a few scattered houses along the shore beyond. As the importance of the settlement grew, the West India Company determined to provide more effectually for its pro- tection ; and the fort, laid out in 1628, according to the mili- tary science of the day, by an engineer sent from Holland, had been completed by the year 1635, together with the various offices of government which it contained. It was designed at first to surround the fort with a broad esplanade, but this plan was afterwards for various reasons abandoned ; while it was entertained, however, certain buildings of the West India Company were constructed east of the fort, to face the esplanade, and at a distance of nearly two hundred feet from the wall. These were a row of five stone houses containing various workshops of the Company, and will be spoken of more in detail hereafter; they played a most im- portant part in the topography of the rising town. When it ^ See post, pages 152 and 271, as to the lane known as the Slyck Steegh. 6 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE became desirable, a few years after the construction of these buildings, to lay out additional streets for the increasing pop- ulation, one street was laid out from the south end of this row of buildings towards the bridge at Broad Street before spoken of, and this received the name of Brugh Straet, or Bridge Street, its present designation ; while a parallel one from the north end of the row of shops, was called, from the West India Company's brewery, which stood upon it, by the name of Brouwer Straet, and when, a number of years after- wards, it was the first street in the town to be paved with cobblestones, it was called the Stony Street, and is to-day still known as Stone Street. In the mean time, while these changes were going on in the village, most of the available farming land in the lower half of Manhattan Island had been appropriated. A great deal of the territory, picturesque enough to the eye, offered few inducements to the Dutch farmers, who arrived in in- creasing numbers, — it was " scrubby," as they wrote home. Consequently, these began to turn their attention to the neighboring parts of New Jersey and of Long Island, where at Pavonia and Bergen, at Gouwanus and the Wallabout, and along the " Mespat Kill," — the present malodorous Newtown Creek, — and upon the East River shore, they settled along the edges of the marshes, "like frogs around a pond," as Pliny has it. These first settlements over the river were made about in the years 1636-40: a ferry now became desirable, and was probably started about this period, at a point where the river was narrowest, near the present Dover Street. To meet the travel from this ferry, a road was extended eastward till it came out upon the river shore near the present Hanover Square, and from that point it followed the water-side to the ferry. East of the present Broad Street, it became known as the Hoogh Straet, or High Street; along it and along the East River shore, houses began to spring up, and this part of the town became for a long time the principal seat of the social and business activity of the place. THE WHITE HORSE TAVERN 7 By the year 1655, considerable attention had been paid to regulating the streets and removing encroachments, and New Amsterdam had begun to assume the appearance of a settled town. Selecting that period of time for a survey of some of the features of the Dutch settlement, let us take our station at the head of Brouwer, or Stone Street ; in front of us, across the Marckveldt, — later Whitehall Street, but now usually known as an extension of Broadway, — rise the sodded ram- parts of Fort Amsterdam, with one of its brass six-pounders trained directly down the narrow street. Inside the fort walls appears the broad stone back of the Governor's house, flanked by two great exterior chimneys at the ends ; and to the left or south of this, likewise within the fort, is the Dutch church with its steep double-gabled roof and low bel- fry. Beyond these buildings may perhaps be seen the tall flagstaff with the orange, white, and blue colors of the West India Company, and a glimpse may be caught likewise of the slowly revolving sails of the Company's grist-mill, on a little knoll outside the fort, on the site of the present Battery Park. Behind us, the unpaved street ^ slopes down towards a small bridge at the ditch, or graft, in what is now Broad Street; and at our right, upon the northeast corner of the street, is the White Horse Tavern of Philip Geraerdy. Just what induced Philip Gerard, as he called himself, or Geraerdy, as his Dutch neighbors called him, to quit Paris (for that was his native place), and to try his fortunes in the little village springing up around the fort at New Amster- dam, it is not easy to surmise. The Paris of the first half of the seventeenth century was, even more than the Paris of a century later, the centre of the political, literary, and social life of Europe ; and it is not to be supposed that the native Parisian of that time had greater predilections for the dull life of a colonist than the Parisians of later days. Cardinal Richelieu, the most subtle politician of that age, with his 1 The residents of this street petitioned on the 15th of March, 1655, that they might be allowed to pave the street with cobblestones at their own expense, but no action was taken in the matter for a considerable period. 8 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE tenacious purpose of humbling the House of Austria, had indeed recently thrown France (in alliance with Sweden), into the bloody struggle of the Thirty Years' War, which was then desolating Germany and the Flemish provinces : there was a constant demand for recruits for the French armies, and Philip was of the military age, — born about 1602, — and as the great French and Swedish generals of that day had the habit of very freely exposing their men to the enemy, Philip may have considered the somewhat monotonous ser- vice of the West India Company a refuge from the risks of that most bloody warfare, — as, in fact, did many others. However this may be, Philip Gerard and Marie Pollet, his wife, found their way to New Amsterdam prior to 1639, and soon established a small tavern — in fact, small enough to be sometimes designated a mere koek-huj^s, or cake-house — upon the corner of the Marckveldt and Brouwer Straet. The change which awaited Philip in quitting the French metropolis must have been a great one. There, all was bust- ling life, but surrounded everywhere by memorials of times long past : in the Rue St. Denis and in the Rue St. Jacques he must have often watched the crowds coming and going along those historic highways over which the traffic of nigh two thousand years had passed ; from the river-side, at the old palace of the Louvre, he had doubtless often viewed that scene, never to be forgotten, where between the ancient, over- hancrino- houses on both sides of the Seine, the isle of La Cite appeared, with its tall old mansions and sharp open point at the Place Dauphine, — like a vast galley in full sail down the river, the great bronze equestrian statue of Henri Quatre at its prow, and the heavy square towers of Notre Dame closing the view. From the same point too, as he looked southwards, he could see the tall graceful spire of Ste. Geneviev^e, where it marked the tomb of King Clovis ; and turning down the river he could watch, at his right, the gay throngs of the people of fashion in the garden of the Tuileries, or, across the river at his left, the frolicking, brawling, drinking, fight- ing, and love-making crowd of students of the University, in THE WHITE HORSE TAVERN 9 the Pr^ aux Clercs, — likely enough he had mingled with the latter many a time. Now, however, in New Amsterdam, all his surroundings were new and humble: from the garden behind his tavern (which garden stretched in an irregularly shaped plot of nearly one hundred and fifty feet in length towards the centre of the present block, and together with the site of the tavern itself is at present covered by the massive pile of the Produce Exchange), he looked, in the first years of his residence here, down a low slope of open ground to a stretch of bogs and bushes extending northwards, with a little sluggish brook winding through it. This was Blommaerts Vly, called after two or three early settlers of that name ; it is now covered by Broad Street and its buildings. Encircling this marsh, the ground rose into low hills, in former years a common pasture ground for cattle, and afterwards a waste sjDot, where, between boulders and blackberry bushes, the negro slaves of the West India Company were allowed to cultivate for their own use little patches of Indian corn, beans, and other vegetables, till 1638, when the land was leased by the Company for six years to Jan Damen, whose farm adjoined it, and who placed part of this ground, along Broadway, under cultivation, and used part as a sheep pasture. Between these enclosed fields of the company and the low hillock upon which Geraerdy's tavern stood, a small arm of the marsh extended westwards. This the Company had attempted to drain by constructing an open ditch along the line of the present Beaver Street ; and along this ditch two or three cottages were built: from Beaver Street down to Stone, along the present Broadway, were one or two more houses, and down Stone Street as many more ; these were all of Philip Geraerdy's immediate neighbors, when he built the White Horse tavern in 1641. The tavern was, as has been said, a small affair, — onl}^ eighteen by twenty- five feet in size, — and the carpenter who erected it estimated that seventy-five florins, or thirty to forty dollars of the present currency, would compensate him for his time. Its " one door and one window " opened into an apartment which 10 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE was in all probability kitchen, dining-room, parlor, and tap- room, and its thatched roof was still in existence as late as 1658. Philip's tavern connections were not, in fact, of the highest. The magnates of the city usually patronized the "City Tavern," on the water-side; the country people from across the Hudson River resorted to the tavern kept by Pieter Kock and Annetje his wife, on the opposite side of the Marckveldt, near where they landed their market boats ; and the Long Island farmers were in the habit of stopping at Sergeant Litschoe's tavern on the present Pearl Street. There remained, however, a considerable class to draw custom from, composed of the servants and " cadets " of the West India Company, from the adjacent fort, — bumptious young fellows from all parts of Northern Europe, who caroused and brawled at the tavern when off duty, and who not infrequently paid for their pranks by " riding the wooden horse," and by other military punishments. Here, too, when now and then a French privateer came into port, the French sailors were wont to resort, to negotiate for the discounting of their prize money, or for forwarding it home ; for Philip seems to have been a man of considerable business capacity, and besides his own language was acquainted with both Dutch and English, occa- sionally performing the duties of an interpreter. It was not all cakes and beer at the sign of the White Horse, however. In 1644, part of a shipment of wine, the whereabouts of which became a subject of investigation by the authorities, was shown to have found its way to Philip Geraerdy's cellar ; and here, too, men of more consideration than the general run of his customers occasionally resorted, such, for instance, as Jan Damen, the thrifty farmer just out of town, whose well-managed farm lay in part between the pres- ent Maiden Lane and Wall Street. Philip duly appreciated such clients, and when Jan Damen became unsteady upon his legs, would obligingly see him home when the road was dark. He did this upon one occasion, to his great inconvenience, as he tells. It was a very dark night in the spring of 1643, when they reached Jan Damen's farmhouse, not far from the THE WHITE HORSE TAVERN 11 present Pine Street. That individual seems to have been in a rather quarrelsome mood, for Geraerdy had taken the precau- tion to draw his guest's sword from its scabbard and to carry it himself. At the house they found Jan Damen's serving- man in a very unamiable temper at being waked between twelve and one o'clock, and he threatened to shoot his employer, " Finally," says Philip, " the above Damen and his servant Dirck began to fight, the man having a knife, and Jan Damen a scabbard, over which Jan Damen fell backwards, deponent having his drawn sword in his hand for the purpose of separat- ing them. Jan Damen stood up and jumped into the house ; he returned immediately with a knife, and as it was very dark, Jan Damen struck deponent under the shoulder-blade," etc. — the surgeon declared it to be a pretty dangerous wound. The White Horse tavern appears to have been a pretty orderly place, upon the whole, but now and then an affray would occur there to enliven the town ; upon one of tliese occasions, the majesty of the Worshipful West India Company was seriously affronted in the person of Hendrick van Dyke, the ensign of its garrison, who was afterwards " fiscal," or prosecuting attorney of the colony. His assailant was an individual rather obscurely spoken of as " Black John," who, as it would seem from his remarks, had come from the seaport of Monnikendam, a few miles from Amsterdam on the Zuyder Zee. Surgeon Van der Bogaerdt of the Company describes the courtly flow of compliments between the actors in the affair, and its unexpected ending. He says that "being at the house of Philip Geraerdy, he heard Black John say to Ensign Van Dyk : ' Brother, my service to you ! ' to which the ensign answered, ' Brother, I thank you.' Instead of handing over the can. Black John struck the ensign with the can on the forehead, so that the blood flowed, saying that is his Monni- kendam fashion, and then threw the ensign over on his back ; — and all this happened without their having any dispute or words with each other." Philip Geraerdy throve in his calling, and within ten or twelve years from the erection of the little tavern upon the 12 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE corner, he had built a new house for his own residence, in his garden, and some fifty or sixty feet down Stone Street.^ By that time, indeed, he may have rented out his tavern, for in 1653, upon occasion of aiding in a loan to the magistrates to build the palisades at Wall Street, he is described as a " trader," — which usually indicated a person who was doing a little bartering with the Indians. He seems, moreover, to have turned his thoughts towards acquiring a bouwery upon Long Island, for in that same year 1653 he received (likely enough, in consideration for his loan) a grant of some fifty acres of fine woodland, sloping down gently to the shore of the East River, a short distance north of the present Astoria. His plans, whatever they may have been, were never real- ized, for he died in 1655. His widow soon married Matthew de Vos, a very respectable notary of the colony. Phihp left a young son, Jean or Jan Geraerdy, to whom his stepfather appears to have been a careful guardian. They resided for a number of years upon the premises in Stone Street, but after his mother's death, Jean Geraerdy sold the property, and in 1676 appears, in an instrument then executed by him, to have been a resident of Rhode Island. Curiously enough, one may see his name, at the present day, in the Italianized form of Gerhardi, in immediate proximity to its original location in New Amsterdam. 1 This building appears to have been of brick, and was apparently one of the best in New Amsterdam, for it was sold at public auction on the 9th of December, 1672, to Captain Thomas Delavall, for 5195 florins, or about at the equivalent of $2100 of the present currency, — a large price considering the value of money at the time, and the ruling prices for real estate. Delavall soon sold the property to John Ryder, another Englishman, from whom it was purchased in 1680 by Frederick Phillipse, Lord of the Manor of Phillipsburgh in Westchester County, who owned much other property in this vicinity. The house was undoubtedly built about 1653, in which year Frans Jausen, the carpenter, sued Geraerdy for the work done, a claim which the latter resisted on the ground that the contract for work on the garret portion of the building "has been most scandalouslj fulfilled." CHAPTER II WINCKEL STRAET, AND THE HOUSE OF DOMINIE BOGAR- DUS. — THE WEST INDIA COMPANY'S STOREHOUSE.— SCHREYERS HOEK Wat bier leeft en oyt vergaderd Heeft zijn uur eu stervens-tijd : Wat hier (door verselling) naderd Ook een droevig-scheijdeu leijd : Wat iu vriendschap is verbonden, Door verkiesiiig, boven 't bleed Word te recbt wel uoyt geschonden ; t Bij-zijn nochtans breken moet. Jacob Steendam : "Deu Distelvink." THE lounger, smoking his pipe of a summer evening upon the wooden bench in front of the White Horse tavern, at the period of which we have been speaking, — about tlie year 1655, — looking across Brouwer or Stone Street, would have seen a row of five small houses, with their gable ends to the Marckveldt, or Whitehall Street, and occupying the entire front between Stone and Bridge streets, now covered by the Kemble Office building. These houses did not front upon the Marckveldt, but upon a small lane parallel with it, and only twenty-two feet in width, which was known as Winckel Straet. At the back of the houses were small gardens or enclosures, which opened out into the Marckveldt. These buildings seem to have been erected about the years 1645-46, and not improbably by the West India Company itself. Allusion has already been made to the Company's row of stone shops which extended from Stone to Bridge Street, and which was intended to face the broad esplanade of the fort. After the Indian troubles had broken out, in 1643, there was for a time a desire on the part 14 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE of some of the colonists to acquire building sites under the immediate shelter of the fort; in order to accommodate them as far as possible, the Company, among various other provisions for their aid, determined to appropriate a portion of the esplanade for building purposes. The narrow Winckel Straet was therefore laid out along the front of the Com- pany's shops; and upon the west side of the new street or lane were built the houses referred to. At the period of our survey, the two northernmost of these houses were owned, as to the one next to Stone Street, by Hendrick Jansen, a baker; the other belonged to Maxi- milian van Geele, a merchant of Amsterdam, who seems to have used it as a temporary residence in the Colony. The two southernmost houses belonged, the one to a certain Caspar Stymetz (some years afterwards it became of in- terest as then belonging to the English Governor, Colonel Lovelace, and, as so belonging, having been plundered and confiscated by the Dutch when they recaptured New Am- sterdam in 1673); the house at the corner of Bridge Street was owned by an Englishman, George Holmes, the pro- prietor of the solitary tobacco farm at Deutel, or " Turtle " Bay, on the East River, who, like many others of the farmers at this time, had a residence within the town. The middle house of this row, however, is of more general interest, as having been the last place of residence in New Amsterdam of Dominie Everardus Bogardus, usually spoken of (though not with strict accuracy) as the first minister of the Dutch church at the settlement. It is the fortune of Dominie Bogardus that his name shines with a somewhat reflected lustre from that of his wife, Annetje Janse, of wide reputation, — the energetic lady from whom so large a portion of the population of New York and vicinity claims descent, as shown in the various Trinity Church litigations. From the upper windows of his house, looking out over the Marckveldt, Dominie Bogardus could probably have seen, across the southeastern bastion of Fort Amsterdam, the roof ANNETJE JANSE BOGARDUS 15 of the cottage in Pearl Street of his respected mother-in-law, Catharine or "Tryn" Jonas. This lady had long occupied a responsible position under the West India Company, no less, in fact, than that of its official midwife, — the thrifty cor- poration going so far as to make this provision for the welfare of its colonists. Tryn Jonas was duly sensible of the dignity and importance of her office, which she exercised with great independence, even to the extent of refusing upon various occasions to attend certain of her patients with whose ante- cedents she was not satisfied. Her daughter Annetje was married, as early as 1626, and several years before leaving Holland, to Roeloff Jansen, who came from the valley of the Mouse, not far from where the crowded spires of Maestricht looked over the complicated girdle of bastions and ravelins and lunettes and hornworks which encompassed that famed fortress. Reaching the Colony in 1630, Roeloff Jansen and his wife repaired at first to Fort Orange, or Albany, where, in ad- dition to his employment as an agricultural foreman to the patroon Van Rensselaer, he appears to have entered upon a trading business with the Indians, and it was in the course of his expeditions in this latter capacity that his name was given to the beautiful stream in Columbia County, which still, between solitary overhanging woods, ripples as merrily over its thick bed of pebbles as when it was first named Roeloff Jansen's Kill. Prior to 1636, however, Roeloff Jansen had taken up his residence in New Amsterdam, and acquired a tract of about sixty acres along the North River, where it formed a sort of peninsula between the river and the swamps which then covered the sites of Canal Street and West Broadway. Here he had probably erected a small farmhouse upon a low hill near the river shore at about the present Jay Street; but he had hardly made a beginning in the work of getting his bouwery under cultivation when he died, leaving to his widow Annetje the arduous task of caring for a family of five small children, in a colony hardly settled as yet. 16 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE In 1633, the Reverend Everardus Bogardus had been sent over to succeed the somewhat interrupted and broken min- istry of Dominie Jonas Michaelis. A new though rather homely church had been built for him upon the East River shore, or upon the present Pearl Street, between Whitehall and Broad streets, and adjoining it was the parsonage. The Dominie was an unmarried man, and lived in solitary st^te at tlie parsonage for several years, drawing his rations from the West India Company, like the rest of its officials and employes, — till 1638, when he married the widow Annetje Janse (or Roeloffse, as she is called, indifferently, following the Dutch fashion), after a marriage settlement which is still extant had been drawn up, providing for the securing to her first husband's children the sum of 200 guilders each. Thus, in addition to his clerical duties, the Dominie as- sumed the cares of a landed proprietor, not only with regard to the North River farm, — which soon became known as " the Dominie's Bouwery," — but also as to another and less con- venient tract which he and his wife had acquired. This was situated some three or four miles up the East River, where, at the mouth of the Mespat Kill, two or three low hillocks of ground rose out of the surrounding marshes, then much sought for on account of their supply of salt hay for the cattle. This tract, which covered about one hundred and thirty acres of upland and meadow, the Dominie had leased out as early as the summer of 16-42, though no house was erected upon it as yet. The locality, which, graded down to a few feet above the water level, is now occupied by the dismal suburb sometimes called Hunter's Point, soon acquired the name of "Dominie's Hoek," and has been constantly confounded by writers upon New Amsterdam with the North River bouwery, some of them going so far, in order to make it fit in with their theories, as to supply the name of Mespat Kill to the sluggish little rill flowing through the swamps along Canal Street. In the year 1642 it was determined to build a new and THE HOUSE OF DOMINIE BOGARDUS 17 substantial church within the walls of the fort. The mo- tives for this change of location are undoubtedly to be found in the apprehension of Indian troubles, too well justified by the event. The new church proceeded rather slowly in building, but within two or three years services were held in it in its unfinished condition. The old church and the par- sonage were then converted to other uses, and Dominie Bogardus appears to have purchased for himself the new house on the Winckel S tract to which reference has been made. Here the Dominie spent the closing years of his ministry. His riding mare duly saddled and bridled, and brought down from the North River bouwery, where her pasturage was provided for with great care in the lease to the tenants, was probably a familiar sight in the Marckveldt, as she stood at her owner's back gate (just on the spot where the main entrance now is to the Kemble Building), waiting for him to set out on his pastoral visits about the town, and to a number of rude farmhouses in their half-cleared bouwerys, for two or three miles up the island. A good deal of the life of the little community centred around the house of Dominie Bogardus ; on the opposite side of the Winckel Straet was the noise and stir of the workmen in the Company's shops ; on the other side of his house was the Marckveldt, where the country people came with their butter and eggs and poultry and vegetables, and now and then an Indian was to be seen with game or fish. A little beyond, on the right, where Bowling Green now is, the sol- diers of the garrison held their drills, or lounged the time away on pleasant days when off duty. A little more than a block away, down the Marckveldt, to the left, was the shore of the East River and the small public dock with its crane for hoisting merchandise to or from the lighters, and, lying at anchor beyond, could generally be seen the vessels in port. Between the Dominie's house and the shore was a building which seems to have occupied most of the Marckveldt front 18 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE on the east side, between Bridge and Pearl streets. This was the storehouse of the West India Company; its exact site is uncertain, but it must have stood upon ground now embraced in Whitehall Street, for in the grant, in 1646, by Director Kieft to Doctor Hans Kiersted, of the lot which is known to have been the present northeast corner of Pearl and Whitehall streets, it is described as having to the west "the Company's Warehouse on the Strand." The edifice can be readily distinguished in the Justus Danckers' View of New Amsterdam, forming the frontispiece of this work. A building for this purpose, and upon this site, was probably one of the earliest erected by the Company ; and as such a structure would naturally be of a substantial character, we are led to infer that the first building must have been burned or accidentally destroyed, for in a report made in 1638 it is stated that "the place where the public store stood can with difficulty be discovered." It must have been rebuilt soon after 1638, however, for in 1640, many complaints of overcharges having been made by the people, the Council ordered that a board containing the prices current should be kept in a con- spicuous position at the store. This building, however, seems to have ceased to be used for store or warehouse purposes soon after the advent of Director-General Stuyvesant, when a new and larger structure appears to have been erected as a public store, or "pack-buys," — and used at the same time by the government as a custom-house. This latter building, of which further notice will be taken, ^ stood upon the north side of Pearl Street a short distance east of the old storehouse. The architecture of the old building was of the simplest character, and the purposes for which it was used in its later years are not known ; it was in all probability removed within a short period as an obstruction to the thoroughfare of the Marckveldt. To the right or west of the Marckveldt, and a short dis- tance beyond where it terminated upon the shore of the East River, was a low bank of land projecting out to a point the 1 See page 52, post. SCHREYERS HOEK 19 site of which is now in the Battery Park, a short distance north of the Staten Island Ferry-house. This was the Capske, — the "cape," or "point," — being the southern ter- mination of Manhattan Island; but it was more generally known in Dominie Bogardus's time as "Schreyers Hoek." The sojourner at Amsterdam, strolling down one of the lines of street bordering the broad stream of the Amstel as it winds through that city, comes out upon a point of land projecting a short distance into the harbor, at the right of the river's mouth. Near it stands a venerable old battlemented tower of stone, with its roof thrown up into a high conical peak of curious form. Here, in the seventeenth century, the Dutch emigrants and their families usually embarked in small boats to reach the East Indiamen or other vessels which lay in the harbor, a short distance out beyond the curving double line of " booms " near the shore. Here, too, their relatives and friends were wont to assemble to take their last leave of those who were bound for the uttermost parts of the globe, — for Ceylon and Batavia, for Brazil and New Netherland, — and whom in most cases they never expected to see again upon earth. From the natural scenes of grief displayed upon these occasions, the locality acquired the name of Schreyers Hoek, "the Weepers' Point," and the tower still retains the name of Schreyers Hoek Tooren. Amsterdam influences prevailed in New Netherland, and the point of land near the public dock, on which the people of New Amsterdam were accustomed to gather upon the important occasion of the sailing of a vessel for Holland, to wave their farewells to friends returning to the old country, naturally acquired the name of the similarly situated locality at Amsterdam, just referred to, and became known also as Schreyers Hoek. Upon this point of land was to have been seen, a short time prior to the period of our survey, in 1655, a deserted cabin, and near it, upon the shore, was drawn up a warped and decaying catboat. These were the property of one Thomas Baxter, an Englishman who, falling out with the Dutch authorities, had abandoned his possessions here and taken 20 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE refuge in New England, where, upon occasion of the war between the English Commonwealth and the Netherlands in 1653, he took out so-called letters of marque from the little Colony of Rhode Island, which asserted thus early its dignity. With a small armed vessel he pestered the Dutch greatly, and captured two or three of their ships. His property on the Schreyers Hoek was confiscated, and upon its site, greatly raised by filling in, was built Director-General Stuyvesant's residence, which afterwards became known as "The White Hall," part of the ground of which is now occupied by the large and somewhat antiquated-looking brick building at the corner of State and Whitehall streets. There are some reasons to suspect that this name was derived from the old palace of Whitehall at Westminster, at that time in its last days, and that it was given rather derisively by the English to Director-General Stuyvesant's not very imposing mansion. CHAPTER III THE WEST INDIA COMPANY AND ITS COLONIAL OFFI- CERS.— THE QUARREL BETWEEN DIRECTOR KIEFT AND DOMINIE BOGARDUS.— THE WRECK OF THE "PRINCESS" Who holds the reins upon you ? The latest gale set free. What meat is in your mangers ? The glut of all the sea. 'Twixt tide and tide's returning Great store of newly dead, — The bones of those that faced us, And the hearts of those that fled. Kipling : " White Horses." NO sketch of Dominie Bogardus would be complete without some reference to the disputes between him and the Director Kieft, which occupied the closing years of the Dominie's ministry at New Amsterdam. The Dutch West India Company, which at one time gave promise of becoming one of the greatest trading corporations ever organized, — which as early as 1626 had a fleet of seventy-three vessels, many of them armed, at its disposal; and which claimed or actually occupied, not only the vast territories of Brazil, but immense tracts of land upon the coasts of Africa, besides New Netherland, and its possessions in the West Indies, — was frequently unfortunate in the administrative officers of its colonies. These men, usually advanced through various gradations from clerks' desks in the historic buildings upon the Haerlemmer Straet and on the Y-Graft, in Amsterdam, which were successively the head- quarters of the West India Company, were often entirely lacking in the qualities essential to a successful magistracy. 22 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE Relieved from the personal supervision of the general officers of the Company, and with extensive powers conferred upon them over the new settlers, they became veritable Sancho Panzas in the colonies. Of these, perhaps the worst speci- men was Willem Kieft, Director-General at New Amsterdam from 1638 to 1647. It is somewhat difficult to describe the character of this man, or to decide which was its leading trait, — his hypoc- risy, his self-importance, his administrative incapacity, or the rancorous venom of his disposition towards his opponents. He had, in fact, all of the offensive qualities of his successor, Director Stuyvesant, without the tenacity of purpose and will of the latter. He was perhaps more thoroughly hated and despised by all classes of the community than any other inhabitant of New Netherland. Moreover, he was as sensi- tive to criticism upon his official acts as are most small-minded men placed in positions of considerable power, and, like such individuals, he was prone to look upon the least animadver- sion upon his conduct, or upon any doubts expressed in rela- tion to the wisdom of his administrative policy, as "treason" of the most glaring description. The motives which impelled Kieft to order the cruel mas- sacre of the Weckquaskeek Indians, in 1643, are not fully known, but seem to have been, in considerable measure, owing to a desire of obtaining easy possession of the lands occupied by them. That tribe, fleeing before a raid of their dreaded enemies, the Mohawks of the north, abandoned their village on the Hudson River near the present Hastings, in Westchester County, and came in the depth of winter to Manhattan Island, and to Pavonia on the west side of the Hudson River, where they encamped in a very destitute and starving condition. Their pitiable plight excited the com- miseration of many of the Dutch, who furnished them with food. Not so with Kieft, however; to him it appeared only as a good opportunity, prepared by Providence, to make the savages "wipe their chops," ^ — -as he feelingly expressed it, — to settle up old scores, and by exterminating the Indians o KIEFT'S INDIAN POLICY 23 to facilitate the expansion of the Colony; and his famous order was issued accordingly : — " February 25th, 1643. We authorize Maryn Andriessen, at his request, with his associates to attack a party of savages skulking behind Corlaers Hook or plantation, and act with them in such a manner as they shall deem proper and the time and opportunity will permit. Sergeant Rodolf is com- manded to take a troop of soldiers and lead them to Pavonia, there to drive away and destroy the savages lying near Jan Evertsen's, but to spare as much as possible their wives and children and take them prisoners. Hans Stein, who is well acquainted with the haunts of the Indians, is to go with him. The exploit should be executed at night with the greatest caution and prudence. God bless the expedition! " Captain David de Vries, sitting by the fire in the Director's kitchen at the fort that cold winter's night, and anxiously awaiting the results of the "exploit," to which he was vio- lently opposed, tells the rest : — " At midnight I heard loud shrieks, and went out to the parapet of the fort and looked towards Pavonia. I saw nothing but the flashing of the guns. I heard no more the cries of the Indians." More than a hundred Indians — men, women, and chil- dren — were killed by these two parties; they were merely butchered in cold blood, for they were completely taken by surprise, — even to the extent of imagining at first that they were assailed by their enemies, the Mohawks ; and they made scarcely any resistance. "No barbarity," says Valentine, " was too shocking to be inflicted upon them. " The natural consequences of such an act a:, this followed swiftly. Most of the outlying farms around New Amster- dam were devastated, and the settlers slain or carried into captivity, by the enraged Indians, There were but few of the inhabitants of New Netherland who did not severely suffer, either directly or indirectly, by this foolhardy and cruel policy of Kieft, and he and his advisers were bitterly attacked by all classes of the community in consequence. 24 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE Among the most outspoken of their antagonists was Dominie Bogardus, who, as Valentine says, "fulminated against them in the pulpit until he fairly drove them out of the congregation." There is considerable evidence that the Dominie was of a rather convivial disposition, though it is not to be believed that he was guilty of anything like the excesses with which Kieft afterwards charged him. It was at the wedding of Magdalena Verdon to Adam Brouwer, a young soldier from Cologne, in the employ of the West India Company, on March 21, 1645, that the Dominie made some public remarks of a rather personal nature respecting Kieft, which seem to have induced that individual to open fire, as it were, upon his reverend opponent. Two days afterwards, accordingly, he sent the clergyman what he calls " a Christian admonition," — which the latter declined to receive, and proceeded with his denunciations of Kieft and his policy. At last, on the 2d of January, 1646, Kieft issued his final and celebrated mani- festo, beginning in the imposing form : " In the name of the Lord, Amen ! The Honorable Director and Council, to the Reverend Everardus Bogardus, Minister of the Gospel in this place." Though couched in this official form, the whole proceeding is transparently the work of Kieft personally. As his grievances consisted, in large measure, in Dominie Bogardus 's public criticisms upon his administrative acts, he opens his manifesto, with fine relevancy, by attacking the Dominie's personal habits, critically distinguishing the acts which he had done, for the six or seven years preceding, when "pretty drunk," from those performed when "thor- oughly drunk." He then proceeds to animadvert upon Dominie Bogardus's conduct in regard to certain matters of church discipline, about which Kieft had as much concern as the drummer of the garrison. Gradually getting to the gist of the matter, he reminds the clergyman of his remarks in a sermon preached by him a short time before, in which he had alluded to certain monsters of the tropics, ■ — " but you know not, said you, from whence, in such a temperate clime as' 111 KIEFT'S MANIFESTO 25 this, such monsters of men are produced. They are the mighty ones who place their confidence in men, and not in the Lord! Children might have told to whom you alluded." Having thus shown how aptly he felt these remarks, as well as certain others of which he complained, to have applied to himself, the Director proceeds to business : " All these things being regarded by us as having a tendency towards the general ruin of the country, both Church and State being endangered where the magistrate is despised, and it being considered that your duty and oath imperatively demand their proper maintenance ; whereas your conduct stirs up the people (already too much divided) to mutiny and rebellion, . . . our sacred duty demanded that we seek out a remedy against this evil ; and this remedy we now intend to employ, in virtue of our high commission from the Company, and we design to prosecute you in a court of justice ; and to do it in due form we made an order that a copy of these our delibera- tions should be delivered to you to answer in fourteen days, protesting that we intend to treat you with such Christian lenity as our conscience and the welfare of State and Church shall in any way permit." The papers presenting Dominie Bogardus's side of this controversy have all perished, but it is very evident that he stoutly maintained his ground, and goaded his small-minded antagonist into a state of fury with each successive rejoinder he made. He lost no time in replying to the document above set forth, by a conmiunication which Kieft characterized as "useless and absurd, as not answering in any respect the charges conveyed to said Bogardus on the 2d January, 1646. Wherefore it is decreed that said Bogardus shall, within the time limited, answer precisely the contents of that paper in an affirmative or negative manner, under penalty that action be taken against him as a rebel and contumax." Dominie Bogardus soon sent in a further reply to the Director which was still less to his liking than the former one, for upon the 18th of January, 1646, he caused an entry to be made in the Council Minutes, in which he characterized 26 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE "a certain paper of Reverend Bogardus," sent to him by that gentleman through the court messenger, as " filled with use- less subterfuges, calumnies, and injuries, besides with a profanation of God's holy word, and designed to vilify His magistrates, of which said Reverend Bogardus, according to his custom, makes use to obscure the truth, and not at all answering our griefs and charges." This paper warfare of legal threats on the one hand, and of apparent denunciation and defiance on the other, was kept up for several months; Dominie Bogardus evidently deny- ing the jurisdiction of the Director and his Council to try the cause against him, and Kieft being apparently not sure of his ground, and living in the constant fear of afterclaps from the home government. In the mean time the Dominie was harassed by a sort of flank attack in the shape of a suit for slander brought against him by Oloff Stevensen van Cort- landt, a deacon of his church and a prominent citizen of New Amsterdam. This latter proceeding, however, was not so much the work of Oloff Stevensen as of Kieft himself, — " lago hurt him, lago set him ou," — and finally, by the mutual good offices of several of the leading men of the community, a reconciliation was brought about between the Dominie and his deacon. During the spring and summer of 1646, the Dominie and the Director- General, looking across the Marckveldt, might perhaps have often seen one another sitting at their open windows upon fine days, engaged in writing their mutual diatribes; but with the latter period came a change, for it was known then that Kieft's official days were numbered, and that a new Director and Council were to be appointed. The prosecution of Dominie Bogardus seems to have re- mained in abeyance for a time, and to have finally taken the form of charges preferred against him to the Classis of Amsterdam, but of their precise nature we are ignorant. THE SHIP "PRINCESS" 27 The latter part of the summei of 1647 was a period of much activity in New Amsterdam. Out in the East River, a little way from the shore, the ship "Princess " lay at anchor, soon to sail for Amsterdam with a heavy passenger list. Kieft and one or two of his late advisers were to return to the Nether- lands with the formidable task before them of explaining to the Directors of the West India Company the justice and expediency of his recent measures with the Indians. He had succeeded, at the first coming of Director- General Stuyve- sant, in poisoning the mind of the latter against several of his, K left's, principal opponents, and two or three of them had been heavily fined and banished from the Colony ; in this number were Captain Jochem Pietersen Kuyter and Cornells Melyn, — two able and determined men, of whom further notice will be taken hereafter; they were now making ready for the voyage, with all their detestation of Kieft transferred to his successor, and fully prepared to renew the battle before the States-General. With them and in close sympathy, went Dominie Bogardus to meet Kieft's charges before the ecclesi- astical tribunal. Among the passengers, too, was Hendrick Jansen, a tailor, whose coarse but vigorous denunciations of Kieft had stirred up the latter to procure his banishment also. Besides these there were merchants and traders returning to buy goods at Amsterdam, among whom was Simon Dircksen Pos, one of the pioneer Indian traders in New Netherland. Several of the servants of the West India Company, whose terms of employment had expired, were also among the pas- sengers, as were also some of the colonists, who, their prop- erties having been destroyed during the Indian troubles, had given up the struggle and were now only anxious to get back with their families to the old country. Many of these passengers were intrusted with various commissions by their friends remaining behind, and the Sec- retary of the Colony was kept unusually busy in registering powers of attorney or " procurations " to collect debts, to receive legacies, to make purchases, to settle litigations, and to transact other similar business in various parts of 28 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE Europe. Along the water-side the porters of the Company were actively employed in transferring bales of furs and of tobacco, with other articles of freight, from the Company's pack-huys, to the little dock near the foot of the present Whitehall Street, and thence by lighter to the "Princess." Among the articles shipped, too, was the wonderful white beaver-skin tipped with yellow; this sport of nature had been brought in by an Indian, and was now sent over to the Netherlands as an unheard of rarity. There was also Kieft's collection, made for the West India Company, of about a hundred specimens of the minerals of New Netherland, con- spicuous among which were the various pieces of pyrites which he had obtained to the west of Hudson River, and which he believed to contain gold. Much more valuable than these was a number of " ver}^ exact maps and accounts of New Netherland," which would have been now of almost priceless value. Finally, when the last chests and packages were shipped and the last passengers had gone on board, the ship's anchor was weighed amidst the ringing of the church bells and the firing of cannon from the fort ; the last farewells were waved between the passengers on the vessel and the crowd on Schreyers Hoek, and the "Princess" sailed down the harbor on the 17th of August, 1647, long watched from the shore as she receded through the heavily wooded shores of the Narrows. Many weeks passed before any further tidings of her reached New Amsterdam. On the southern coast of Wales, at the mouth of a broad valley sloping down from the " Black Mountains " of Breck- nock and Carmarthen shires, lies the old town of Swansea, upon what is thought by many to be the most beautiful spot upon the coast of the English island. Walter Savage Landor gave it the preference, in an artistic point of view, to the Bay of Naples. Here, looking seaward upon a fine day, over the steely-blue waters of the Bristol Channel, the Exmoor Hills, and beyond them the mountains of Devonshire are seen in the far distance across the broad estuary, where WRECK OF THE "PRINCESS" 29 " Silent, majestical, and slow, The white ships hover to and fro, With all their ghostly sails unfurled, As beings from another world Haunt the dim confines of existence." From the town westward the shore of yellow sand curves in a bold, semicircular sweep, not unlike that of the Bay of Naples, and ends in the massive limestone rocks known as "The Mumbles," now crowned by a lighthouse of elegant form. Looking landwards, the valleys stretching inland are seen to be separated by massive spurs of the mountains of Wales, which terminate abruptly above the beach. Here, to many of the passengers and crew of the "Princess," was their journey's end, " And very sea-mark of their utmost sail." The captain of the vessel missed his reckoning in a violent September gale, and ran up the Bristol Channel. The ship was thrown upon the rocks near Swansea, and soon went to pieces; of about one hundred persons on board, eighty perished, among whom were Kieft and Dominie Bogardus, — all their dissensions being terminated by the Great Arbitrator. After the death of her husband. New Amsterdam seems to have become distasteful to Annetje Janse Bogardus, and about the end of 1647 she and her family removed to Fort Orange, or Albany, where she had spent some of her earlier years, and where she purchased a house and garden spot at the northeast corner of Middle Lane (now James Street), and Joncker or the present State Street; here she died in 1663. The Dominie's house on the Winckel S tract and the Marck- veldt in New Amsterdam was retained by his family for a number of years ; and about the period of our survey, in 1655, it seems to have been occupied by a tenant, Warner Wessells, a man of some prominence in the town who purchased it a year or two afterwards. The quiet street leading up the hill at Albany, upon which Annetje Bogardus dwelt, has now 30 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE become a broad and busy thoroughfare, over which the crowds passing to and from the Capitol travel daily, and a bronze tablet upon the Mechanics and Farmers Savings Bank at that place marks the site of her house ; but nothing per- petuates the memory of the dwelling in New Amsterdam where she and her husband, calumniated and harassed by their malicious and unscrupulous enemy, passed many dark and stormy hours. ^ ^ It is understood, however, that steps have been very recently taken towards having a commemorative tablet erected upon, or very near to, the site of Dominie Bogardus's house in Whitehall Street. CHAPTER IV ''THE FIVE STONE HOUSES."— THE BRUGH STEEGH, OR BRIDGE LANE. — THE BREWERY OF THE WEST INDIA COMPANY. — PIE TER CORNELISSEN AND HIS GARDEN. — EENDRICK KIP, THE TAILOR ON the east side of the Winckel Straet, to which pre- vious reference has been made, stood five stone build- ings, of probably two or three stories in height. These are usually misnamed, by writers upon New Amsterdam, "The Company's Storehouses ; " they were, however, in no sense storehouses, except in so far as they may have served to store materials for the work which was carried on there. They were in fact used as workshops for the various branches of labor conducted under the direction of the officers of the West India Company, and seem to have contained the shops of the carpenter, the blacksmith, the cooper, and the armorer of the Company, with prolmbly others, such as those of the tailor, the shoemaker, the hatter, etc, for the garrison and for the other employ(is of that economical corporation, which aimed at supplying, through its own workmen, most of the wants of its servants. Perhaps the most singular appurtenance of the Five Houses was a goathouse in their rear, which was built in Director Van Twiller's time, as we are informed by an entry in the i-ecords, in 1689. Of the precise date of the erection of these buildings we are ignorant, but it must have been very early, for in 1638 we are told that they were " in need of considerable repair." ^ After the surrender to the English, in 1664, the " Five ^ These buildings are clearly distinguishable upon the " Hartgers View " of 1628 or 1630, aud were probably then just erected. See ante, page 2, note. 32 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE Houses " were confiscated as the property of the West India Company.^ Being no longer required for their original pur- poses, they were put to various uses by the English ; among others they were used for a time partly as officers' quarters, and partly as a hospital for the garrison ; but becoming dilap- idated, they were demolished about the year 1680, and the sites sold. The narrow Winckel Straet was then closed and granted to the owners of the private houses fronting upon it on the west, whose lots had previously been rather short in depth, and were now made to front upon Whitehall Street. The site of the Five Shops of the West India Com- pany is now covered, so far at least as the end towards Stone 1 Immediately after the surrender to the English in 1664, an attachment was sued out against these houses upon an alleged cLaim against the West India Company by one George Baxter. Baxter was an Englishman of a rather tur- bulent disposition who had been for a number of years in the Company's ser- vice, and was a lieutenant under the notorious Captain John Underbill. As early as 1641, he had attempted to farm a tract upon Manhattan Island, embrac- ing the site of the present Bellevue Hospital, and forming a part of what was afterwards known as the Kip's Bay Farm. Subsequently he acquired a tract of land near Gravesend upon Long Island. He is understood to have been a brother of Thomas Baxter, whose difficulties with the Dutch Colonial administra- tion and the confiscation of whose property have been previously alluded to (ante, p. 19). Influenced by motives apparently not unconnected with his brother's misfortunes, George Baxter, in the beginning of 1655, was instrumental in stirring up considerable resistance to the Dutch authorities at Gravesend. He was promptly arrested and imprisoned at the Town Hall in New Amster- dam, but while thus in prison he prevailed upon one Thomas Greedy, a resident of the newly planted settlement of Middelburg (now Newtown) upon Long Island, to make an attempt, \vith the aid of a negro man, to drive away his (Baxter's) cattle, which had been seized by the Gravesend magistrates, and were in their custody. For this offence Greedy received a sentence of twelve years' banishment, and the property of Baxter was confiscated. Upon the sur- render in 1664, however, Baxter, evidently believing that the English day had come, presented a claim of 1278 florins against the Company for his losses, and attached their liouses as above stated. Cornelis van Ruyven, the former Secre- tary of the Colony, who had been appointed by Governor Nicoll a trustee or receiver of the West India Company's property, appeared before the magistrates, and recapitulated to them Baxter's doings of nearly ten years before. He was roughly interrupted several times by Baxter, who gave him the lie repeatedly in the presence of the court. The tribunal was not very sympathetic, for it not only fined Baxter for contempt of court, but appears to have taken no further notice of his proceedings. THE BRUGH STEEGH 3^ Street is concerned, by what is known as the "Merchants' Building." The land occupied by the West India Company's shops, between Stone and Bridge streets, seems to have been partly bounded upon the east by a narrow and obscure lane, known as the Br ugh Steegh, or "Bridge Lane," which was a cross- way to facilitate communication with the bridge over the small stream which ran through the present Broad Street, and which was probably in use before Brouwer or Stone Street was opened through ; it may indeed have been the remains of an earlier plan of streets than the one finally adopted, for there are evidences of its having extended through the present blocks as far north as Beaver Street, and through what was sometimes called the Church Lane (being a narrow passageway lying west of the first church building), south into Pearl Street/ This lane crossed the site now occupied by the building known as No. 6 on the south side of Stone Street, and bore off somewhat to the east as it approached Bridge Street. It was about twenty-two English feet in width. Upon the west side of this lane and extending to within a few feet of Bridge Street, stood a house used at one time ap- parently as the official residence of the officer known as the fiscal, or public prosecutor, of the colony. In 1647, it being then perhaps no longer used for such purposes, we find 1 There are, in fact, certain obscure indications presented by the " Hartgers View," and by some of the early records, that the first village consisted of three narrow parallel lanes running north and south, and one — the so-called Beaver Path — running east and west. Of these lanes the easternmost appears to have been the Brugh Steegh ; the middle one seems to have occujiied the easterly portion of the present Whitehall Street and the Bowling Green, and to have been merely widened upon the west, and thrown into the later Marckveldt ; while the westernmost of the lanes, with the buildings upon it, would then have occupied the present Bowling Green, into wliich it would liave been thrown, and its buildings demolished at the time of the construction of the fort and its ap- proaches, 1628-35. As for the Beaver Path, there can be little doubt that it was originally a continuation to the North River sliore of the present Beaver Street, and was not, as has been claimed, the present Morris Street. The portion we.st of Broadway was closed and granted to private parties before 1650. 3 34 I^EW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE Director-General Stuyvesant recommending the establishment of a more permanent school than had hitherto existed, and that it should be kept " in the kitchen of the fiscal." After the opening of Stone Street, not long before the date last mentioned, the lane was no longer much needed for public use, and it appears to have fallen into the condition of a mere open passageway. It was not finally closed, however, till 1674, when with other public lands it was used to afford small building sites for several persons, whose houses had been demolished as being too near the fortifications. Just east of the Brugh Steegh stood the brewery of the West India Company, upon land now occupied in part by an engine-house of the New York Fire Department and in part by the building No. 10 Stone Street. This brewery must have been erected at a very early date, and undoubtedly gave to the street its original appellation of the " Brouwer's Straet." Valentine finds the derivation of the name of this street in the fact that Oloff Stevensen van Cortlandt, who resided upon the north side of the street, nearly opposite to this building, was himself at one time engaged in the business of brewing. It does not appear, however, from the early records that his brewery actually stood upon Stone Street ; it seems to have been rather upon the lane known as the Marckveldt Steegh, of which a fragment survives to-day as Marketfield Street ; at all events, the brewery of the West India Com- pany must have antedated Van Cortlandt's residence here by at least half a score of years. When Peter Stuyvesant was sent over as Director-General, in 1647, after the ruinous administration of Kieft, he saw that something must be done in the way of raising taxes from the people of New Amster- dam, so as to relieve the West India Company of part of the burden of maintaining the colony. He could think of no better device for this end than by enforcing a stringent excise tax upon wine and beer. In order to carry this out successfully, it would be desirable for the company to discon- tinue its own brewing operations, and to throw the business into the hands of private parties. This led, without doubt, to PIETER CORNELISSEN'S GARDEN 35 the abandonment of the Company's brewery, and, in 1651, the ground is referred to as being " where the Company's brew-house formerly hath stood." That the building had then been demolished is not necessarily implied, and does not seem to have been the case, for on the rude plan of New York attached to the Nicoll Map, of about 1666, a building of more than ordinary size is shown as occupying this location. Upon a September day in the year 1637, the yacht " Dol- phin" lay at anchor near the mouth of the Texel. Here, amidst the crowd of Dutch men-of-war, or merchant vessels, East Indiamen, Baltic coasters, colliers from Newcastle, and fishing smacks from all parts of the North Sea, which filled that great commercial highway of the Netherlands, leading from the Zuyder Zee out into the German Ocean, the skipper of the " Dolphin " hailed his brother skipper of the " Herring." He was in very poor trim for an ocean voyage to New Amsterdam, to which port he was bound ; his vessel was leaking badly; he had no carpenter, and his crew stoutly refused to go to sea without one. Could the skipper of the " Herring " do anything for him ? On board of the " Her- ring " was a young carpenter named Pieter Cornelissen, whom the skipper of his vessel was able to spare ; and as he was willing to go, he embarked on board of the " Dolphin " and reached New Amsterdam in safety, after a perilous voyage in which most of the cargo was ruined. He never returned to Europe, but became a denizen of New Amsterdam. It was upon such slight accidental circumstances as these tliat many of the colonists came to America. At New Amsterdam, Cornelissen entered the service of the West India Company as a house carpenter, or " timmerman," and thus acquired the appellation which he retained the remainder of his life, of Pieter Cornelissen Timmerman. Looking about him for an available building spot in New Amsterdam, Pieter Cornelissen found, along the south side of the newly laid out Brouwer or Stone Street, a long, narrow strip of vacant ground, extending from the West India Com- 86 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE pany's Brewery down to within thirty or forty feet of the present Broad Street. Brugh or Bridge Street, as has pre- viously been stated, was in use as a street for a considerable time before Stone Street was marked out, and the grants of land upon it were so deep that nothing remained afterwards upon the latter street but this strip acquired by Cornelissen, which was only about fifty feet wide at one end, and at the end towards Broad Street not more than twenty feet wide. It seems to have been still further curtailed of its dimensions by a subsequent widening of Brouwer Straet, to the extent of several feet, the Director and Council reserving the right to so widen the "road" in the grant to Cornelissen in 1646. Pieter Cornehssen does not seem to have erected any house upon this property, but he planted it with fi-uit trees in preparation for doing so. The present locality of the south side of Stone Street, towards Broad, is little suggestive of cherry, peach, and pear trees, yet here they stood in bearing in the year 1651, at which time Cornelissen departed from New Amsterdam, probably under the orders of the Company, for the Dutch settlements on the South or Delaware River. Re- turning subsequently to New Amsterdam, he rebuilt, after its destruction, in 1655, by the Indians, the mill upon Wessell's Creek, in the late town of Newtown, upon Long Island. This mill site, in a picturesque spot not far from the resort now known as North Beach, was used for its original purposes until comparatively recent years, being of late known as " Jackson's Mill." Pieter Cornelissen did not operate it very long himself, but he purchased land in the immediate neighbor- hood, and was the ancestor of a worthy family not yet extinct there. Before leaving New Amsterdam, in 1651, he found a purchaser for his property on Brouwer Straet, in the person of Jacob Kip, the son of Hendrick Hendricksen Kip, the latter of whom owned the adjoining property fronting upon Brugh or Bridge Street, where his house stood. Hendrick, the father, who was sometime of Amsterdam, seems to have been one of the earliest settlers in New Amsterdam, and his house here had probably been built for several years previous to his ground brief for the land in 1642. HENDRICK KIP THE TAILOR 37 Hendrick Hendricksen Kip was perhaps one of the most valorous tailors who ever drew needle. If, as Valentine somewhat problematically asserts, his cognomen of " Kip " meant " chicken," it must have referred to a gamecock^ of the first breed. He pitted himself against the redoubtable Director Kieft at an early period, and never smoothed his ruffled feathers till the latter had departed for the Netherlands upon his recall, even refusing to give him a parting shake of the hand in token of amnesty. It was several years before that event, or about 1643, that Hendrick, according to an officious informer, uttered a witticism of appalling audacity towards his " divinely appointed magistrate" (as Kieft was fond of calling himself), saying that "people ought to send the Kivit" (meaning " pee-wit," or " lap-wing," — a play at once upon Kieft's name, person, and character) " home by the Pauwe" (peacock), " and also to give a letter of recommendation to Master Gerrit " (the public executioner, or Jack Ketch, of Holland) ; " he, himself, would willingly send a pound Flemish, in order that he should let him die like a nobleman." This generous offer had refer- ence to the custom in the Germanic countries of inflicting: capital punishment upon the nobility by decapitation, and upon the lower classes by hanging — a custom alluded to by Heine in his appeal to the Kaiser Friedrich Rothbart, or Barbarossa, for impartial rule in the " Holy German Empire," upon his future awakening from his legendary slumber : " Nur manchmal wechsle ab und lass Den Adel hangen, und kopfe Ein bisschen die Burger und Bauern, wu* sind Ja alle Gottesgeschbpfe." Change once in a while, and let the nobleman be hung, and the peasant's head be chopped off. Are we not all alike God's creatures! CHAPTER V HENDRICK KIP AND HIS HOUSE.— THE KIP COTTAGES ON STONE STREET. ~ JAN J AN SEN VAN ST. OBIN AND THE SLAVE SHIP " GIDEON" Um Christi willen verschone, o Herr, Das Leben der schwarzeii Siinder ! Erziirnten sie dich, so weisst dn ja, Sie sind so dumm wie die Kinder. Verschone ihr Leben um Christi willn, Der f iir uns alle gestorben ! Denn blciben mir nicht dreihundert Stiick, So ist mein Geschaft verdorben. Heine. IN the last preceding chapter, some allusion was made to the hostility of Hendrick Hendricksen Kip, the tailor of Brugh or Bridge Street, towards Director-General Kieft. So hostile was he, in fact, that he actually refused upon one occasion to give him something which is usually very freely tendered, — being such a cheap gift, — namely, advice. It was after Kieft and his associates had patched up a proposed treaty with the Indians to end the ruinous war which he had brought on the colonists in 1643. The Council, on the 30th of August, 1645, ordered the court messenger to " notify all the inhabitants to assemble in the Fort when the colors are hoisted and the bell rung, to hear the proposals on which a peace is about to be concluded with the Indians, and if any one can give good advice, then to offer it freely." That worthy made his report to the Council that " all the citizens in the Manhat- tans, from the highest to the lowest, will attend, except one Hendrick Kip, a tailor." HENDRICK KIP'S HOUSE 39 Although Hendrick seems to have been more fortunate than many others in keeping out of the clutches of Kieft, yet the government had its eye upon him ; and when his more indis- creet " huysvrouw " made pubhc statements that " the Direc- tor and Council were false judges, and the fiscal a forsworn fiscal," it pounced upon her at once on a charge of a sort of lese-majeste. The good lady stoutly denied the charges, but her husband, with a phenomenal astuteness, appeared before the court and stated that " his wife has been so upset and so out of health ever since Maryn Adriaensen's attempt to mur- der the Director- General, that when disturbed in the least she knows not what she does.'' The reference was to the assault attempted upon Kieft, nearly three years before, by one Maryn Adriaensen, in a quarrel about their respective shares of culpa- bility in bringing about the Indian War. The prosecutor and the defendant in the court proceedings were ordered to produce their evidence, but notliing further appears to have been done in the matter, Kieft being soon afterwards recalled. With his well-known views respecting the imbecility of the late administration in New Netherland, Hendrick Kip was chosen one of the committee known as " The Nine Men," which drew up a remonstrance to the States-General against the policy adopted by the colonial government of the West India Company, and the ruinous results brought thereby upon the colonists. The new Director-General, Peter Stuyvesant, im- mediately took up the cudgels in behalf of all maligned magis- trates, and sent the Secretary Van Tienhoven over to the Netherlands to refute the charges made before the States- General. The " refutation " consisted principally in vilifying the members of the Committee who had dared to sign the remonstrance. "As to losses," said the Secretary, "Hendrick Kip was a tailor, who never lost anything," which in Van Tienhoven's mouth was only another way of saying he had nothing to lose. This, however, was not true. Kip's worldly condition was doubtless not equal to that of some of the other colonists, but his house, in its garden of about sixty-five feet front upon 40 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE Bridge Street, was quietly occupied by him for many years ; while upon the land adjoining it on Stone Street, where Pieter Cornelissen had planted liis garden (previously described), Hendrick's two sons, Isaac and Jacob, and his son-in-law, Jan Jansen van St. Obin, built houses for themselves. All these houses had a clear outlook upon the East River, and upon the vessels in port (which usually anchored directly in front of them), and to the wooded Long Island shores beyond, — for no houses were built at this point along the river shore at Pearl Street, to intercept the view, prior to 1656. The last buildings upon the shore at that time, coming eastwards from the fort, were the former Dutch church and its parsonage, erected in 1633, the church standing nearly opposite the westerly corner of Hendrick Kip's garden. It has been already stated that the two sons and the son-in- law of Hendrick Kip had their dwellings upon the south side of Stone Street, in what had previously been Pieter Cornelis- sen's garden. These were probably small cottages, as the plots of ground upon which they stood were of small size ; and they were built just about the period of our survey, in 1655, though the precise dates are uncertain. Their owners were quite young men at the time, and recently married. The easternmost of these houses, which extended within forty or fifty feet of the present Broad Street, was that of Isaac Kip, afterwards a Hudson River trader; and near it on the west was that of his brother Jacob, — the site of both these build- ings being now covered by Davidson's Caf^. Jacob Kip, the second of these brothers, was a man of considerable activity and enterprise. His marriage, in 1654, to Marie de la Montague, daughter of Doctor Jean (or Johannes, using the Latinized form, by which he was generally known) de la Montague, seems to have served him in the way of advance- ment, his wife's father — a French Huguenot, and a man of education — having stood high in the favor of Kieft and of the Directors of the West India Company. As one of the city magistrates, and as Secretary of the Court of Burgomasters, Jacob Kip's bold, business-like signature is familiar in the JAN JANSEN VAN ST. OBIN 41 old records, and indeed he was a clerk to Director-General Stuyvesant at a still earlier date, in 1650. In later years, he became somewhat of an investor in unimproved or farm lands on Manhattan Island, and about the year 1670 he bought an old " frontier " plantation which had seen many vicissitudes, and there established a farm, to the vicinity of which he gave a name that became historic, the memory of which has not yet entirely faded away ; namely, that of " Kip's Bay," on the East River at about Thirty-Fifth to Thirty-Seventh streets, Jan Jansen, the brother-in-law of the two young Kips, who also occupied a house upon the south side of Stone Street, somewhat to the west of the cottages of the latter, was a per- son of a rather different disposition. He was undoubtedly of Dutch or of Flemish extraction, and is usually spoken of in the records of the time as Jan Jansen van St. Obin ; but in the church record of his marriage in 1649 to Baertje (or Bertha) Hendrickse Kip, his place of nativity is given as " Tiibingen," — presumably the city of that name in the Duchy of Wiirtemberg, in Germany. While there may be grounds for supposing, from the similarity of sound, that the latter designation is a mistake or a corruption of some other name, the locality of " St. Obin " seems to be unknown in Dutch topography. Jan Jansen's father, Jan Wansaer, seems to have been a resident of Casant, not far from Antwerp. Jan Jansen van St. Obin was a person of nautical proclivi- ties, insomuch that he became a part owner of the small French frigate " La Garce," which sailed as a privateer under letters from the Dutch government. She afterwards got into trouble with the Admiralty about her prizes, but at the time of Jan Jansen's interest in her (for he appears to have sold out his share in 1646) we may presume that she confined her atten- tion strictly to the Spanish and Portuguese craft which were within the line of her legitimate business, though the captains of privateering vessels in this war were sometimes rather obtuse upon such points, and took almost anything that came along. Whether Jan Jansen sailed personally in the priva- teer is not known, but certain it is that occasionally, about 42 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE this time, bis business seems to have called him away from New Amsterdam for protracted periods, at which times be bad the practice of depositing with various prominent men of New Amsterdam considerable amounts of personal property, taking their receipts for it, which he caused to be promptly entered upon the books of the Secretary of the Colony. Upon one of these occasions, the deposit was of quite a large amount of silver ware, — rather an unusual stock for a New Netherland " trader," and which leads to the conjecture that it may have been picked up by him somewhere upon the Spanish main, or perhaps in the West Indies. Jan Jansen, however, was not always fortunate in his adventures, for shortly prior to 1654, a bark in which he was then interested was captured — or "stolen," as the Dutch authorities expressed it — by Thomas Baxter, claiming to act under letters of marque issued at Rhode Island, to which previous allusion has been made. Baxter, who was probably not much hampered by Admiralty rules, promptly disposed of his prize to Thomas Moore of New Haven, but the Dutch government contrived to bring such pressure to bear upon the latter that, together with Isaac Allerton, the leading merchant in the New England trade, at New Amsterdam, he gave a bond for the restoration of the vessel or its value. Jan Jansen van St.Obin is perhaps most prominently known as the pilot of the slave ship " Gideon," which arrived at the harbor of New Amsterdam, with a cargo of two hundred and ninety slaves, in August, 1664, a few days before the appear- ance of the Enghsh fleet concerned in the capture of New Netherland. These slaves, Director Stuyvesant wrote, were " a very poor assortment. The females certainly all so poor that we apprehend the largest part of them will remain at our charge, or we must otherwise part with them at a very low price." The Director-General's estimate of the condition of these blacks appears to have been a pretty just one, for we afterwards find Johan de Decker (who had been a member of Director Stuyvesant's Council, but who, having become ob- noxious to the new authorities, had been ordered to " within THE SLAVE TRADE 43 the space of ten dayes transporte himselfe out of this governe- ment"), presenting a petition from Amsterdam to the Duke of York for the restoration of certain negroes, forming a part of the Gideon's " assortment " which had been seized at New Amsterdam by order of Governor NicoU. It appears from this document that twenty of these negroes had been allotted to the petitioner by way of settlement of his arrears of vsalary at New Amsterdam : ten of them he had otherwise disposed of, " having ye other tenne negroes in (now so called) New Yorke in ye custody of one Resolved Waldron to dyett and keep them for your petitioner." The " Gideon " had evidently lacked the master mind of "The supercargo, Mynheer van Koek," of Heine's ballad, who, being distressed by the an- nouncement from the physician of his slave-ship that the negroes were dying upon the passage in great numbers, from melancholy, devised the genial scheme of forcing them by the lash to daily dances to quick music, in order to keep up their spirits and drive dull care away. Whether Jan Jansen, as pilot of the " Gideon," received his pay in the same commodity as De Decker, we are not in- formed. He certainly suffered no diminution of respectability in the community of his time by reason of his occupation ; furthermore, the gains were large, and that alone would have been quite sufficient with most of his neighbors to smother any inconvenient suggestions that might have arisen : — " Glass beads, and brandy, and scissors and knives, And other cheap trash for them giving, — The profit at least eight hundred per cent, If I keep the half of them living. For fetch I three hundred blacks alive To the port of Rio Janeiro, 'T is a hundred ducats apiece for me, From the house of Gonzales Perreiro." If any supersensitive persons were found who ventured to question the right and justice of this traffic, a host of sup- porters were as ready then as now, with about as much or as little hypocrisy, to show the divinely appointed rights of the 44 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE superior race over the inferior, and the law of Destiny which imperatively demanded that the latter should be flogged, as it were, out of darkness into the light. It is only fair to say, however, that among the Dutch of New Netherland the slave trade exhibited its least repulsive features. No important difficulties occurred between the blacks and their masters in New Amsterdam, nor do the former seem to have been often the subjects of any serious criminal prosecutions. The negroes settled down into house and farm servants; the relations between them and their masters were usually of a somewhat patriarchal nature, manu- missions were frequent, and sincere attachment was often manifested on both sides. It was the hysterical English and their Recorder, Horsmanden, who were responsible for tl;ie ghastly tragedy of the "Negro Plot " in the next century, and for the fiendish torture of the numerous innocent victims of that insane delusion. -y '^■"^yyiJ w''^ CHAPTER VI THE WATER-SIDE. — DR. HANS KIERSTED. — THE HOUSES OF CORNELIS VAN STEENWYCK AND JOHANNES NEVIUS. — CAPTAIN PAULUS VANDERGRIFT—THE STOREHOUSE OF THE WEST INDIA COMPANY. — THE WAREHOUSE OF AUGUSTYN HEERMANS. — SECRETARY VAN TIEN- HOVEN. — THE OLD CHURCH AND PARSONAGE SOME notice should be taken of the buildings along the river shore, east of the Marckveldt, or Whitehall Street, and of their occupants in the year 1655. These houses fronted upon an open street, then called 't Water, — the modern Pearl Street, — but upon the opposite side of the roadway was the open shingly beach of the East River. The houses here, at the time of our survey, stood in compact order, and were substantially built, most if not all of them being of brick. Though the deeds or ground briefs for most of the parcels of land at this locality were made from 1645 to 1647, it is diffi- cult to believe that they had not been in several instances built upon at an earlier period. Nearly all of the buildings were used for mercantile purposes, the front portions of the structures being probably used as stores, while the occupants availed themselves of the other portions for their dwellings. This place was, in short, the seat of the larger part of the wholesale and retail trade of the town. Of the first building, in proceeding eastwards from the Marckveldt, which building was the former storehouse of the West India Company, mention has already been made.^ The next house, which soon became the corner one by the removal of the structure of the West India Company, was long the residence of Doctor Hans Kiersted, the leading physician 1 See ante, page 18. 46 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE and surgeon of the town. Hans Kiersted and his brother Jochera (the latter of whom perished in 1647, in the wreck of the " Princess ") were Germans from Magdeburg; and as they were early residents of New Amsterdam, there is reason to suspect that they were refugees after the dreadful sack of Magdeburg by Count Tilly's savage troops in the year 1631, at which time Hans Kiersted was about nineteen years of age. He is found, as early as the year 1638, holding the position of official surgeon of the West India Company at New Amster- dam, and the Dutch records contain many of his official cer- tificates given within the next eight or ten years as to wounds received in various affrays by the quarrelsome soldiers of the garrison at Fort Amsterdam. In 1642, by his marriage to Sarah Roeloffse, Doctor Kiersted became son-in-law to Annetje Janse Bogardus, and within a few years after that event, — as early as 1646, — we find him residing here upon the water-side, where his humble stock of drugs would doubtless have formed a great contrast to that of the modern "pharmacy " which has been established next door to the original site of the trade in New Amsterdam. Before 1648, "Doctor Hans," as he was frequently called, had quitted the service of the West India Company, and was engaged in his own private practice, which seems to have been a reasonably lucrative one, for as early as 1646 he was the owner of a " plantation " upon the Bouwery Lane, about a mile and a half out of the town. Doctor Kiersted died shortly prior to 1667, but fifty years later his property at the corner of Pearl and Whitehall streets was still in the occu- pation of his descendants. The next neighbor upon the east of Doctor Hans, in the year 1655, was a man who, though not particularly con- spicuous at that time, subsequently became of considerable prominence in the town; this was Cornelis Jacobsen van Steenwyck, formerly of Haerlem in Holland. The period of his coming to New Amsterdam is not known, though he is mentioned as early as 1651, and it appears probable that he was a brother of Abraham Jacobsen van Steenwyck, who is CORNELIS VAN STEENWYCK 47 found at New Amsterdam as early as 1643. Cornelis van Steenwyck was a merchant, and in all probability had his store in this building, which occupied the site of the present No. 27 Pearl Street; it was a modest house, like that of his neighbors on either side, and it had not been built by Van Steenwyck himself, but was purchased by him in 1653 from a Norwegian, Roeloff Jansen Haies, who seems to have been the first owner of the property. Cornelis van Steenwyck soon became interested in shipping ventures ; in 1654 he was a partner with several of the prin- cipal men of the town ^ in the ship " Golden Shark," then sent on a voyage to the West Indies, and in the next year we find him, with several others, signing a protest against the action of the Director and Council, who had refused to allow the signers to proceed upon a contemplated voyage to Hol- land, — for this each of the signers was fined 25 guilders by the despotic Stuyvesant. In spite, however, of differences with the authorities, Van Steenwyck seems to have thrived so well that, in 1063, the Director-General himself had become a borrower on behalf of the needy West India Com- pany from that merchant, who agreed to advance the sum of 12,000 guilders (about $4800) in wampum, upon a draft on the West India Company, backed up by the curious collateral security of four brass cannon in Fort Amsterdam. He had at this time indeed become one of the leading merchants in New Amsterdam, with a keen eye for profits in almost any direction, handling at one time a cargo of salt, and at another a cargo of negro slaves. His business, at the time of the surrender to the English in 1664, had outgrown his modest store on 't Water, and for several years he had occupied a more elaborate establishment at the corner of the present Bridge and Whitehall streets, just back of the house in which he had dwelt in 1655. With a fair knowledge of the English language, and with a disposition readily to accept the English rule, Cornelis van ^ With Paulus Leendertsen van der Grift, Cornelis Schutt, Allard Anthony, and Govert Loockermaus. 48 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE Steenwyck soon acquired the confidence of the new authori- ties, and was a member of the Colonial Council under Gov- ernors Nicolls and Lovelace. Furthermore, he was popular with the Dutch citizens, was one of the burgomasters of the city both before and after the surrender, and was mayor from 1668 to 1670, and again in 1682 and 1683, shortly before his death. In his latter years Cornelis van Steenwyck, who had long been considered to be a man of wealth, probably kept up as luxurious a style of living as any one in the Colony at that time, but at the period of our survey he was an unmarried man, and his store on 't Water was doubtless not materially different from the ordinary general store of a small trading town.^ The next neighbor of Cornelis van Steenwyck upon the east, in the year of our survey, was a man who was afterwards of some prominence as notary and Clerk of the Burgomasters, or City Clerk, as he may be called, which office he held as early as 1658, and which he filled for a number of years subsequent to that time. This was Johannes Nevius, who is said to have come from Solen or Zoelen, a village of the district known as The Betuwe, which skirts the south bank of the Rhine below Arnhem, and who was himself, at the period of our survey, one of the city magistrates or schepens, of New Amsterdam, and was a merchant or trader who seems to have been associated in business with his wife's step-father, Cornelis de Potter, a merchant of note in the town. 2 Looking a mile or so up the East River from his windows upon the water-side, Johannes Nevius could see the dwelling-house and the pastures and grain-fields of his father-in-law's farm just where the Breucklyn Road came down the hill at the present Fulton Street in Brooklyn. Here De Potter had purchased, as early as 1652, from Cornelis Dircksen, the old ferryman, and from one or two 1 For sketch by Mr. D. T. Valentine, giving many curious particulars of Cornelis van Steenwyck, see Man. N. Y. Com. Council for 1864, p. 648, 2 In 1654 Nevius and Cornelis de Potter were sued as being jointly indebted for the construction of a vessel called the " New Love." Portrait of Cornelis vax Steenwyck. THE TOWN CLERK NEVIUS 49 other owners, the ferry property with sixty or seventy acres of land lying north of Fulton Street; and with the curious appurtenance of "thirty -five goats and a half on Jan Marris' farm at Gravesend," — evidently a share or interest in a herd kept there. He does not seem to have managed the ferry in person, but leased it to others. Ariaentje Bleyck, the wife of Johannes Nevius and step- daughter of Cornells de Potter, appears by her marriage record in the Dutch Church on Nov. 18, 1653, to have been a native of, or at any rate to have resided at, Batavia, in the island of Java. It was there, in all probability, that her mother, Swantje Janse, married Cornells de Potter (who was doubtless a widower at the time), since his own daughter Elizabeth, who in the same year of the marriage of her step- sister was united in matrimony to Isaac Bedlo, afterwards a man of note in New Amsterdam, appears likewise in the marriage record as from Batavia. Johannes Nevius did not long occupy the house on 't Water in New Amsterdam, for in 1658 he sold it to his neighbor Cornells van Steenwyck. Subsequently the build- ing, which covered the site of the present house, No. 29 Pearl Street, became of interest, as the residence for a long time of Dominie Samuel Drisius, minister of the Dutch Church at New Amsterdam from 1652 to 1671.^ In the very interesting and important view of New Am- sterdam which appears upon the map of Nicolaes Visscher, of about 1652,2 ^g ^qH g^g \^ ^j^g Justus Danckers view 1 Johannes Nevius, after the surrender to the English in 1664, found himself greatly hampered in his ofhce of city clerk, by reason of his imperfect knowledge of the English language. After using the services of an English assistant for a time, he appears to have given up his office, and to have devoted his latter years to the management of the ferry establishment belonging to his then deceased father-in-law's estate. There is a bill extant for ferry services performed by Johannes Nevius, which was presented to Secretary Nicolls, of the Colonial Government, in 1676, by the widow of Nevius ; she had previously, in 1672, upon her petition setting forth that she was a widow " with six small helpless chil- dren," been allowed an extension for six years of her husband's ferry lease. ^ Entitled, " Novi Belgii, Novseque Angliae necnon partis VirginiiE Tabula 4 62- NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE know. If Captain Van der Grift ever actually resided in this house it was probably for no long period, for at an early date he built a residence upon the North River, west of Broad- way, where, in the Indian attack of 1655, he is said to have been severely wounded by a blow from an axe, at the hands of one of the savages. After the surrender to the English in 1664, Captain Van der Grift was one of the irreconcilables, and in or about the year 1671 he closed out his interests in New York, by the sale of all his real estate to various parties, and returned to the Netherlands. His storehouse on 't Water, above referred to, occupied the site of the present building. No. 31 Pearl Street. It was apparently a short time prior to the year 1649 that the Director-General and Council decided to build a more spacious and substantial storehouse, or "pack-huys," for the West India Company at New Amsterdam, than it had previously possessed. The building erected in pursuance of this resolution stood next eastward from Captain Van der Grift's warehouse, and was the middle one of the three tall structures previously referred to as appearing upon the Visscher and upon the Justus Danckers views of New Am- sterdam. The edifice was probably of brick, and is without doubt the one referred to in a communication written in the year 1649, in which we find the economical Board of Directors of the West India Company, at Amsterdam, cen- suring the authorities of New Netherland "for building a storehouse, or undertaking the same, one hundred feet long and nineteen feet broad, without knowing precisely what for." This structure was evidently used, in part, at the last-mentioned date as a custom-house; for in "The Peti- tion of the Commonalty " to the home authorities, made in that year, speaking of importations into the Colony, "the cargo," say the petitioners, "is discharged into the Com- pany's warehouse, and there it proceeds so as to be a grief and vexation to behold, for it is all measured anew, un- THE "PACK-HUYS" 63 packed, thrown about and counted, without either rule or order; besides, the Company's servants bite sharp and carry away." When, in 1664, New Netherland was surrendered to the English, the pack-huys was confiscated as being the property of the West India Company, and the building became the custom-house of the new administration, for which pur- pose it was used until the middle of the following century, when, having been negligently allowed by the colonial authorities to fall into disrepair, it came to be considered dangerous, and was presented as a nuisance by the Grand Jury about the year 1750, soon after which it was ordered to be demolished, the Custom-House having been in the mean time removed to the western side of Broadway. The site of this interesting building, the worn threshold of which must have been trodden by nearly every man of prominence in the business and j)olitical life of New Amsterdam and of New York in the latter half of the seventeenth and in the first half of the eighteenth century, was the westerly portion of the present large tea warehouse, No. 33 Pearl Street. The third, or easternmost of the three prominent houses upon the Visscher and Danckers views of New Amsterdam, referred to above, had been built before the year 1651, by Augustyn Heermans, of whom a more extended notice will be given hereafter, in connection with his residence in what was called the Smits Vly. At an early date — certainly as early as 1644, and in all probability for a number of years before that time — Augustyn Heermans had been the agent or factor at New Amsterdam of the mercantile firm of Peter Gabry and Sons, of Amsterdam. No mention is made of the site of the first trading house or store of Heermans, but it is very likely to have been the same spot where afterwards, about 1650, he erected a substantial warehouse, the descrip- tion of which is still extant. The building was, so we are told, twenty-eight feet broad and sixty-four feet long (about twenty-six by fifty-nine English feet), " with a cellar under 54 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE the whole." Its walls were two feet in thickness, and it was " three royal stories high ; " that is, three full or high-ceiled stories, not including the lofts under the tall-gabled roof. In the rear it appears to have possessed an out-kitchen, fitting it for a residence as well as for a storehouse. This spacious building seems to have been in part used as a tobacco ware- house, in which trade Heermans was largely interested, for in a petition made by him, in 1658, for permission to make a voyage to the Dutch and French West Indies, he describes himself as "the first beginner of the Virginia tobacco trade." The site of this building is at present covered by the easterly portion of the warehouse, No. 33 Pearl Street, and by the westerly portion of No. 35. Heermans was also engaged in business adventures of a different nature, for in 1646 we find him, with several other citizens of New Amsterdam, partners in a small privateer called "La Garce," which annoyed the Spaniards a good deal, but which finally made an illegal capture which must have entailed considerable loss upon her owners. It may have been owing to this cause that, in 1651, Augustyn Heermans had fallen into financial difficulties; and upon the 17th of July of that year, he made a conveyance of his warehouse on 't Water to Cornells van Werckhoven, as curator, or trustee of the estate of Peter Gabry, deceased, the head of the Amsterdam firm of which Heermans was the factor. His other creditors, however, began to press Heermans, and in 1652 he found himself obliged to leave New Amsterdam temporarily, and to make an assignment of his property to his neighbor. Captain Paulus Leendertsen van der Grift, and to Allard Anthony. A settlement, however, was soon made with the creditors, and on the 8th of May, 1653, we find the latter executing an agreement to abide by the valuation which should be placed by arbitrators upon the warehouse which had been previously conveyed in trust for the Gabrys, and which, as it would appear, the creditors claimed had been 'put in at a figure below its value. The arbitrators accordingly reported that the building was worth 8500 SECRETARY VAN TIENPIOVEN 55 guilders, or about $3400 of the present currency. No further opposition appears to have been made by the cred- itors, and Heermans was soon upon his feet again, finan- cially. The warehouse remained in the possession of the Gabr}'S till the English capture of New Amsterdam, in 1664, when the building, like the pack-huys adjoining, was con- fiscated on the ground that it belonged to the subjects of a hostile foreign State. A few years afterwards we find it in the occupation of Captain William Dyre, collector of the port of New York. By the Danker and Sluyter view, of 1679, it would appear that prior to that date this building, with the adjoining pack-huys, had been newly fronted, giving the two structures the appearance of one edifice, of consider- able size. The two large modern warehouses, Nos. 33 and 35 Pearl Street, occupy sites around which many interesting associa- tions cluster. In addition to that portion of the buildings upon the site of which stood the edifices already described, the eastern portion of No. 35 Pearl Street was, in 1655, the site of a dwelling-house of little less interest. Here might have been seen daily, passing to and from this house at the period named, or taking his ease upon fine days, at its threshold, in the very rare intervals of his leisure, — for he led a busy life, — a middle-aged man of corpulent habit "with red and bloated visage and light hair." This was Cornells van Tienhoven, Secretary of the Council, more particularly identified than any other individual with the history of New Netherland during at least a score of the earlier years of its existence. While little is known about the younger years of this man,^ we find that he early acquired an influence in the government of New Netherland, which he preserved under such dissimilar administrations as those of Directors Van Twiller, Kieft, and Stuyvesant. This in- fluence he managed to preserve too in spite of many rash 1 According to Valentine, he was book-keeper of wages for the West India Company, as early as 1633. 56 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE and unfortunate schemes, for which he was in large measure responsible, and in spite of the incessant attacks of his enemies, who comprised a large part of the community. His character has been drawn in the "Vertoogh," or "Remon- strance of New Netherland," in 1649, by no friendly hand, but in a manner which seems to be justified by the facts we know of him. "He is," say the authors of this vigorous paper, " crafty, subtle, intelligent, sharp-witted, — good gifts when properly applied. ... He is a great adept at dissimu- lation, and even when laughing, intends to bite, and pro- fesses the warmest friendship where he hates the deepest. ... In his words and acts he is loose, false, deceitful, and given to lying : prodigal of promises, and when it comes to performance, there is nobody at home. . . . Now, if the voice of the people be the voice of God, of this man hardly any good can with truth be said, and no evil concealed." It was Cornelis van Tienhoven who shared with Kieft the odium of the Indian War of 1643, as well as of the earlier expedition against the Raritans which resulted in the destruc- tion of the first colonists of Staten Island. Of his flagrant immorality even the sanctimonious Stuyvesant had full knowledge. During his sojourn in the Netherlands in 1650-51, while acting as Stuyvesant's agent to refute the charges made against the colonial government, he almost openly defied the States-General, ^ yet he contrived to remain in apparently undiminished authority at New Amsterdam, defying and harassing his enemies as usual. At the period of our survey, however, the Secretary's time was growing short, and it was in June of the next year, 1656, that he appeared with apparently undiminished assur- ance before the burgomasters of the town, and, announcing that he had been dismissed from office, he requested that a formal certificate might be given to him of his efficiency in the office of schout, or sheriff, which he had also held. In the fall of the same year he disappeared from New Amster- dam; some articles of his attire found on the river shore 1 See post, page 119. VAN TIENHOVEN'S FAMILY 57 induced the belief that he had committed suicide, while many stoutly asserted that he had absconded to get out of the reach of his numerous enemies. There seems to be, however, no reliable evidence that he was ever heard of afterwards; and there would appear to have been little opportunity for a man of such prominence as the ex-Sec- retary to get away from New Netherland without discovery and to keep himself in complete concealment. Van Tienhoven's residence on 't Water (which does not appear upon the Visscher view of New Amsterdam of 1651 or 1652) had not been built by the Secretary himself, but probably by one Jacob Haie, from whom Van Tienhoven had bought it in the spring of 1653, the house appearing to have been then recently erected. Next to it, upon the east, lay a vacant lot composed of a part of the then closed Church Lane, — originally a continuation of the Brugh Steegh. This had been granted in the early part of 1647, upon the breaking up of the old church property here, to Oloff Stevensen van Cortlandt, who however did not build upon it, but sold it to Jacob Varrevanger within a year or two ; and in 1655, the year of our survey, it was acquired by Van Tienhoven, who seems to have built upon it before his disappearance from New Netherland. The Secretary, prior to 1638, had married Rachel Vinje, the stepdaughter of Jan Damen, one of the leading men of the Colony ; and after the disappearance of her husband, she lived here with her young children for a few years till her death in 1663. The chil- dren, of whom Lucas, the eldest, was about fourteen years of age at his mother's death, and his sister Jannetje was six, appear to have been cared for by their uncle Pieter Stouten- burgh,! and after they had grown up and come into posses- sion of the considerable landed estate left by their parents, ^ 1 He had married Aefje van Tienhoven, sister of the Secretary, in 1649. ^ Rachel van Tienhoven had inherited one-fourth part of the Damen farm, lying between Wall Street and Maiden Lane, while Cornelis, her husband, besides several parcels of land in the town proper, was the owner of the farm lying between the modern Maiden Lane and Ann Street. 58 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE Lucas van Tienhoven, who became a phj^sician of promi- nence, occupied for many years the former residence of his father on 't Water, while his sister Jannetje, who had married a person named John Smith, resided in tlie house adjoining upon the east on the site of the present No. 37 Pearl Street. The dingy warehouses of the present day, in the locality at which we have now arrived, with their closed shutters, give the impression that they are in a condition of perma- nent slumber, only waking up at intervals to receive or to discharge an occasional truck-load of merchandise, and then relapsing into somnolence. There is little in the surround- ings now to call up ecclesiastical associations, yet here, upon the site of the warehouse. No. 39 Pearl Street, ^ stood the first church building erected between the Plymouth Colony and Virginia (the churches of which settlements antedated this by but very few years), and where Dominie Bogardus preached to tlie ancestors of many of the principal New York families. Not even a cheap memorial tablet marks the spot. The church edifice, which was constructed of wood, in the year 1633, was doubtless not built for architectural effect; since critics speak of it, at the time of the' building of the new church within the fort, as "a mean barn."^ The waters of the East River washed the shore a few rods in front of the entrance to the church, from which, upon fine Sabbath mornings, the congregation must have often looked across to the white sand bluffs of the heights of Long Island, shining in the sun, and crowned by unbroken forests which extended to the horizon. At the west side of the building a narrow lane or passage ran through from Brugh Straet (modern 1 And probably upon a few feet of the building No. 37. 2 The people generally, however, are stated to have been opposed to the build- ing of the new church within the walls of the fort, and this measure is described by contemporary writers as having been largely the work of Director Kieft him- self, who may even then have had in contemplation his plan of exterminating the neighboring Indians, and was therefore desirous of providing against future contingencies. c ~ s^ H r^ l-l a u > en a. -IS < H !« K IS Gitdi hi::*" e-^ ■3 C o J I J =« o I* £ C cs t- •^ U iJ p t»>H -c 0.2 S ® ? =SS -£■= c^ OP o. _ 5<«: .Si S H tt'.i ci 5 e E c3: .... .fa . • THE OLD CHURCH AND PARSONAGE 59 Bridge Street) to the shore, while upon its east side, and probably fronting the Brugli Straet, stood the modest parson- age with the Dominie's stable near it, this latter structure standing apparently upon the lane and in the rear of the church. It was at this parsonage, ^ in all probability, that the historic wedding took place, in the fall of 1642, of Doctor Hans Kiersted to Dominie Bogardus's eldest stepdaughter, Sara Roelofse. Director-General Kieft, who was then on good terms with the Dominie, was present, and had a plan for getting a liberal subscription for the new church upon this occasion. "The Director," say the authors of the "Remonstrance of New Netherland," "thought this a good time for his purpose, and set to work after the fourth or fifth drink; and he himself setting a liberal example, let the wedding guests sign whatever they were disposed to give towards the church. Each then, with a light head, sub- scribed away at a handsome rate, one competing with the other, and although some heartily repented it when their senses came back, they were obliged nevertheless to pay." When the new church in the fort was sufficiently advanced in building, so that religious services might be held within it, and about the year 1643 or 1644, the old church building became a sort of "lumber house" of the West India Com- pany, where tol^acco, furs, and other articles were stored and prepared for shipment, and where wood was piled and sawed, sometimes by prisoners serving out sentences. In 1647 the Church Lane and the parsonage were sold, — the latter to one Pieter Lourensen. Finally, in 1656, the Company decided to sell the old church at auction, and upon such sale it was purchased by Jacob van Couwenhoven, a trader and general speculator, who soon transferred it to Isaac de Foreest; the latter owned the building many years, and it appears to have been generally used as a warehouse of some description, but it was afterwards made a dwelling-house, and was for a long 1 The site of this parsonage would appear to have been the rear of the modern building, No. 45 Pearl Street. There is here, for some reason, a break in the consecutive numbering of the modern houses. 60 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE time the residence of Allard Anthony or of his family; it was standing as late as 1718. If, as seems to be the case, it is the building prominently shown near the shore and east of the pack-huys of the West India Company, in the Visscher view of New Amsterdam, it would appear to have been a low structure with not the slightest pretensions to ornamentation of any description ; it was doubtless sufficiently spacious in its ground-plan, but presents a rather "squatty" appearance, and the term "barn," as applied to it, is not inapt.^ Beyond the church and the parsonage, as far as the ditch, or "graft," in the present Broad Street, the ground was open and ungranted at the time of our survey, but in the following year 1656, the remainder of the ground embraced in the present block between Bridge and Pearl streets was granted, in four small parcels to different persons, Avho soon built upon their lots here. 1 As to apparent defects occurring just at this point in the Justus Danckers view of New Amsterdam, see remarks in Appendix I., to this volume. CHAPTER VII ADAM ROELANTSEN, THE FIRST SCHOOLMASTER IN NEW AMSTERDAM, AND HIS HOUSE ON STONE STREET.— CAPTAIN WILLEM TOMASSEN From hence the low murmur of his pupils' voices, conning over their lessons, might be heard in a drowsy summer's day, like the hum of a beehive, interrupted now and then by the authoritative voice of the master, in the tone of menace or command ; or, peradventure, by the appalling sound of the birch, as he urged gome tardy loiterer along the flowery path of knowledge. Irving : " Legend of Sleepy Hollow," WE take our station again at the garden attached to Philip Geraerdy's White Horse tavern, whicli has been already described as having been upon the north side of Stone Street near Whitehall. Here the proprietor, hoeing his beans and cabbages and parsnips in the early summer morning, has probably often stopped to discuss the news of the day with his neighbor, Adam Roelantsen, the first school- master of New Amsterdam, over the fence of rougli palisades which divided their respective gardens. Adam Roelantsen Groen — for that was the full name, of which he occasionally made use — came over from the ancient little town of Dockum, situated in Friesland, in the extreme north of the Netherlands and within six or eight miles of the shore of the North Sea, where it stood surrounded by rich but treeless and monotonous meadows, and by the numerous salt-pans along the river Ee. Adam Roelantsen arrived from the Netherlands while still a young man and as one of the earlier colonists ; he was born about 1606, and was at New Amsterdam before the year 1633. The Frisians seem frequently to possess an aptitude for the exact sciences, particularly for mathematics, which renders 62 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE them valuable as schoolteachers, but as to Roelantsen's labors in this capacity, very little is known. He could hardly have taught many pupils at his earliest house, for it was very small, having in all probability been one of the original log and bark cottages of the settlement; it stood upon a mere slip of land but little larger than the house itself, and which lay between Geraerdy's garden and the Brouwer or Stone Street, and was probably the remains of a larger plot enclosed before the street was projected. To the eastward, on the north side of Stone Street, Roelantsen had a garden of fair extent, rather more than fifty by one hundred feet in area. A curious fact, showing the condition of the rising village, is that in 1641, Jan Damen's cattle, pasturing on the West India Company's land above the present Beaver Street, leased by Damen, broke out and made their way into this garden of Roelantsen, — there being apparently at that time no enclosed land lying between, — where they committed depredations for which he was awarded damages in the sum of twenty-three carolus guilders, — some eight or ten dollars of the present currency. Roelantsen possessed one trait which must have seriously impaired his usefulness as an instructor: he seems to have been fond of prying into his neighbor's private affairs ; and he not only kept a sharp eye on their actions, but when he discovered anything particularly racy, he retailed it out with great unction. This, as early as the year 1638, had brought out quite a crop of slander prosecutions, not only against Roelantsen, but by him against some of his assailants. These usually terminated, however, after the New Amsterdam fashion, in which the parties, after accusing one another of the most villanous actions, rushed to the court for redress, and when the cause came on for hearing, — either because they had no evidence to support or to defeat the charges, or else for the purpose of saving the costs of the trial, — they commonly retracted all that had been said on either side, and gave each other clean, not to say complimentary, bills ( of character, which were duly spread upon the minutes of the ROELANTSEN, THE SCHOOLMASTER 63 court. Roelantsen, indeed, was not a popular man, and as earl}' as 1643 he had a rival at New Amsterdam in the person of Jan Stevensen, another schoolmaster; but as little is known of the latter in that capacity as of Roelantsen himself. The proba- bilities are, however, that Adam was forced to resort to other means of eking out a livehhood for himself and for his young family. Mr. Valentine says, from certain court proceedings in 1638, that there is " some reason to suppose that the town schoolmaster also took in washing." This was, in fact, a suit by Roelantsen for the washing of defendant's linen, in which the defence was that " the year is not yet elapsed." It evi- dently referred to the business, still conducted to a consider- able extent in Holland, of contracting for the washing for various periods, for individuals or for families, the work being carried on by employes of the contractor. Affairs did not thrive with Adam Roelantsen, who seems to have found himself considerably burdened with debts. Part of these were no doubt incurred in building a new and larger house for himself a little to the east of his old one, upon the north side of Stone Street, in the spring of 1642. His origi- nal dwelling, which stood just about where the open court of the Produce Exchange now is, on Stone Street, was occupied for a short time after the completion of the new one, by negroes of the West India Company, but towards the end of 1642, he sold the materials of the old building to one Uldrich Klein. Prior to 1646, Roelantsen, taking with him his eldest son, then a small boy, had departed for the Netherlands, upon what business we are uninformed. During his absence his wife Lyntie Martense died, leaving several small children (the youngest of whom were only about four and two years old respectively), with no one to look after them. Upon the 9tli of March, 1646, the sad plight of the cliildren was brought to the attention of the members of the Council, who after due deliberation adopted the somewhat ponderous resolution of appointing four of the nearest neighbors — to wit: Philip Geraerdy, Dr. Hans Kiersted, Jan Stevensen, the schoolmas- 64 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE ter, and Oloff Stevensen van Cortlandt — as curators or guardians, to look after the children " till the arrival of the father or some news of him," At last, about the month of July in the same year, Adam made his appearance in the ship "St. Jacob" from Amster- dam, but he did not come under auspicious circumstances. He had first to settle with the authorities for removing some of his goods from the public store before they were inspected ; and after this he was sued for the board of himself and his son during the voyage, by the owner of the vessel: he was able, however, to defeat this latter claim by showing that the skipper of the " St. Jacob " had promised him his passage " if he would perform seaman's work on the vessel, and his son said the prayers." There may be some just grounds for suspicion that Adam Roelantsen was preparing for a new marriage, for in the fall of 1646, we find him contracting for new wainscoting and other improvements for his house ; if this were the case, his plans were seriously interfered with by an untoward occur- rence in December of that year. He had about that time offered a grievous insult to the wife of one of his neighbors, and the matter, taken in connection with Adam's previous doings, was brought to the notice of the Council ; after de- liberation that body adjudged that he should be publicly flogged, and banished from the Colony, as a nuisance. This sentence, like many others of the Council, was largely in terrorem^ for four days afterwards, or on the i7th of Decem- ber, 1646, they entered a further order : " In consideration that the aforesaid defendant has four small children, without a mother, and a cold winter is approaching, the actual ban- ishment of the above sentence is delayed by the Director- General and Council until a more favorable opportunity, when the defendant may leave the country." Roelantsen remained in New Netherland, in fact, for at least three years longer, but during the earlier portion of that period he seems to have been regarded as a mere privileged prisoner, and per- haps was such in a legal point of view. The carousing fiscal, ROELANTSEN AND THE FISCAL 65 or prosecutor, Hendrick van Dyke, seems after a while to have found Roelantsen a useful person to attach to himself as a sort of servant or lackey ; and in that capacity he had placed him, one evening in August, 1647, to keep watch before one of the taverns in the town, within which the fiscal was engaged in some parting festivities, in all probability, with some of his friends who were just on the point of departing on the fatal voyage of the " Princess." Just why Van Dyke needed a sentinel does not appear, but it is a fair conjecture that he feared the austerity of Director Stuy vesant, and was uncertain of his standing in the new regime of that magistrate. At any rate, the attractions of the tavern proved too strong for Roelantsen. " Some time afterwards," says one of the party present at the tavern upon this occasion, " said Roelantsen came in, and the fiscal asked, 'What are you doing here? Why do you not watch at the door ? * Said Roelantsen answered there was nothing to watch. The fiscal, replying, said, ' You are my servant ; you must wait at the door,' and at the same time struck said Roelantsen with the back of his hand, and at the same time cried out, ' Throw the blackguard out of doors.' Thereupon the above-named Adam Roelantsen was thrust out of doors." It may perhaps have been to quiet the hubbub caused by this affair that in this same year we find Roelantsen appointed provoost, or jailer. He remained at New Amsterdam till the latter part of the year 1649 ; on the 4th of December of that year, being then apparently on the point of embarking for the West Indies, he executed a letter of procuration to Jacob Tysen or Marritje Claes " to have during his absence a fatherly and motherly care of his children, who remain here with them." If he actually left New Amsterdam at this time he must have found his way back, for in 1653 he appears to have been a " wood sawyer " for the Company, employed in its packing house, the old church on Pearl Street. He seems to have sunk into the condition of a drudge -of the West India Company, but was still at his old tricks, for he had an affray with one Stoffel Elsworth about the time mentioned and received a severe beating from 5 GG NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE him. His house and garden on Brouwer or Stone Street had been taken into possession by one Claes Jansen Rust, probably a mortgagee, before Roelantsen's departure in 1649, for, in August of the same year, it had been sold by the cura- tors of the estate of the former, who was then deceased, to Captain Willem Tomassen, " Skipper, under God, of the ' Falconer,' " who held the premises at the period of our survey in 1655. The description of this building, which stood upon the eastern portion of the site of the present Produce Exchange, has been pretty clearly preserved to us. It was a clapboard structure, cov- ered with a reed roof, and eighteen by thirty feet in size. Like most of the buildings in the thickly settled districts, it stood with its gable end to the street. At the front door was the usual " portal " with its wooden seats. Outside of the frame a chim- ney of squared timber was carried up. Within, the fireplace was provided with the luxury of a mantelpiece, and we may presume that the living room was ornamented with the " fifty- one leaves of wainscot," for which Adam Roelantsen had con- tracted a few years before. The house contained the usual " bedstead " or permanent frame built in, for state occasions, being somewhat of the nature of a bunk. It is perhaps a little difficult to go back now, in imagination, to the time when Adam Roelantsen and his family, upon the first mild evenings in spring, could listen from this house to the chorus of the " spring peepers " from Blommaert's Vly, along the present Broad Street ; what time the air, perhaps, was heavy with the smell of burning brush from Barent Dircksen's new clearing, just north of Maiden Lane ; yet an unbroken succes- sion of human life has, in fact, occupied this spot from such period, through nearly nine generations. As for Captain Willem Tomassen, he appears to have been a resident of New Netlierland prior to 1643, in which year he leased from Cornells Dircksen the then recently established ferry of the latter to Long Island, together with a house, gar- den, and some thirty odd acres of land at the foot of what is now Fulton Street, in Brooklyn, but which was then a mere CHAPTER VIII SURGEON VAN DER BOGAERDT AND HIS HOUSE. — HIS TRAGICAL DEATH.-THE PRIVATEER "LA GARCE" AND HER PRIZES- ISAAC DE FOREEST THERE were sinister memories connected with the house on the north side of Stone Street, next to that of Captain Tomassen, as we proceed eastward. At the period of our survey, in 1655, it was owned and occupied by Isaac de Foreest, a man of prominence in the town, but its first owner and builder was Harmanus Meyndertsen van der Bogaerdt, for several years the surgeon of the West India Company at New Amsterdam. Few men commenced hfe in New Netherland under more favorable auspices than did Surgeon Van der Bogaerdt. Com- ing over to the colony in the ship " Eendracht " from Amster- dam in 1630, when he could have been hardly more than a medical student, he seems to have acquired and to have main- tained the confidence of the company's superior officers for a long series of years. He appears, indeed, to have had an intimate acquaintance with many of the brawls and scandals that took place in the town, but probably this was only in the line of his professional duties. The Director and Council seem to have been disposed to advance Van der Bogaerdt in lines not connected with his profession, and in 1639 he made a voyage to the West Indies as supercargo of the ship " Canary Bird." As to his ancestry in the Netherlands, or as to the particular place from wliich he came, we have no definite information. From his will, made in 1638, just prior to his voyage to the West Indies above referred to, we learn that his wife, Jelisje, was the daughter of one Claes Jansen, from Zierikzee, in Zea- CAPTAIN WILLEM TOMASSEN 67 track, winding up a wooded ravine to afford access to the scat- tered clearings in the vicinity of Gowanus and of the Wall- about. How long Captain Tomassen's connection with the ferry lasted we do not know. He was a man of other affairs, and in 1647 was skipper of the " Great Gerrit," trading to Amsterdam. He seems to have been held in high estimation by Director-General Stuyvesant, for soon after the arrival of the latter to enter upon his administration at New Amsterdam, he appointed, in May, 1647, Captain Tomassen " storekeeper to watch over the company's effects," and also commander of the company's ships and forces in the absence of the Director-Gen- eral. At the time of this appointment, Captain Tomassen gave up the command of his vessel ; but two years later, at the time of his purchase of the Roelantsen house,we find him in command of another ship, the " Valckenier," or " Falconer," not a very large vessel, as in 1650, when he brought over one hundred and forty passengers on one of his trips from the Netherlands, we are informed that he had to leave many behind who were anxious to take passage with hun, but for whom there was no room on board. In the house which we have described he resided for several years, but died within a year or two of the period of our survey. He was fond of using the latinized form of Gulielmus for his name, which was corrupted by his Dutch neighbors into " lelmer," by which appellation he occasionally appears upon the old records. THE PRIVATEER "LA GARCE" 69 land, an ancient little to^\^l rich with its memories of desperate struggles with the Spaniards ; the fame of its citizen-soldier, Lieve Heere, who precipitated himself into the sea voluntarily, lest a despatch which he was carrying through the lines of the Spanish besiegers should fall into their hands, has been the theme of poets in other tongues besides that of the Dutch. Surgeon Van der Bogaerdt appears to have been related, either personally or on the side of his wife, to Claes Cornelissen Swits, whose tragical death, upon his solitary bouwery, at the hands of an Indian in 1642, was one of the remote causes which led up to Kieft's massacre of the Indians in the follow- ing year, and to the ruinous struggle which succeeded it. About the beginning of the summer of 1642, we find the surgeon selling to two Englishmen, James Smith and William Brown, his interest as "co-heir" in the plantation of the mur- dered man. At about the same time he executed a power of attorney to one of his brothers-in-law in the Netherlands to collect certain rents for him in the province of Zealand ; but whether his interest in these arose in the same manner, by reason of the death of Claes Cornelissen, we have no information. As early as 1645, Surgeon Van der Bogaerdt appears to have been living on " the road," as it was then often called, the name Brouwer Straet not being as yet in much use ; here he had a plot of between fifty and sixty feet front, for which he did not obtain his " ground-brief " till the early part of 1647. His residence here must have been somewhat interrupted, how- ever, for in 1646 he had obtained the important appointment of commissary at Fort Orange, or Albany. The surgeon ap- pears to have been a man who was somewhat well to do, for in the early part of 1647, he had purchased a share in the privateering frigate "La Garce," to which a previous allu- sion has been made. This vessel, under the command of Captain Blauveldt, a very active and enterprising officer, had become famous at New Amsterdam (where she paid frequent visits) as early as 1644, when Captain Blauveldt captured 70 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE after a severe conflict, and brought into port, two Spanish barks. " La Garce " continued assiduously for several years to hunt Spanish prizes, but unfortunately Captain Blauveldt was so busy that he apparently had no time to go on shore occasionally to get information as to whether the war was still continuing between the United Netherlands, whose com- mission he carried, and the government of Spain. As a matter of fact, the long struggle between those countries was termi- nated by a treaty of peace in 1647, in which the independence of the Netherlands was at last fully acknowledged ; though the great Treaty of Westphalia, which definitively restored peace to the larger portion of Europe, was not signed until the following year. In view of these events, the people of New Amsterdam were astounded to see, in the spring of 1649, about a year and a half after the treaty of peace. Captain Blauveldt and " La Garce " come sailing proudly up the har- bor, bringing with him as a prize the Spanish bark " Tabasco," which he had captured in the river of the same name, empty- ing into the southern part of the Gulf of Mexico. Captain Blauveldt could not understand the scruples that were raised about the lawfulness of his capture. He said if there had been a treaty of peace with Spain, he had never heard of it. Besides that, he said, the Spaniard had never heard of it either, and when he summoned her to surrender, had answered by firing upon him. Moreover, he insisted, "La Garce," though sailing under Dutch colors and owned by Dutch pro- prietors, was really a French-built vessel, and France and Spain were still at war. The captain's arguments were not convincing, however, except possibly to the owners of " La Garce." The cause dragged along in the prize courts upon one technicality and another for a number of years, and the " Tabasco " was at last decided not to have been lawful prize. Long before this happened, however, one of the owners, Sur- geon Van der Bogaerdt, had ceased to have any interest in "La Garce" and her prizes. At Albany, in the winter of 1647-48, he was accused of a criminal offence of grave nature. He took refuge in the Mohawk Country among the Indians, DEATH OF SURGEON VAN DER BOGAERDT 71 with whom he had become well acquainted in the course of his official business at Albany, and when a party was sent by the magistrates to arrest him he made a determined resistance. In the course of the fray, the Indian cabin, in which he had fortified himself, which seems to have been a building of some size and importance, was set on fire, either accidentally or designedly, and Harmanus van der Bogaerdt perished in the flames. This affair made a great sensation in New Amster- dam, where his wife would seem to have been living at the time. The Indians demanded to be reimbursed for the de- struction of their building, and in February, 1648, the Director-General and Council ordered a part of Van der Bogaerdt's garden, upon Stone Street in New Amsterdam, to be sold for the purpose of indemnifying the Indians. The part sold seems to be the easternmost portion of the exten-. sive site of the Produce Exchange. Van der Bogaerdt's widow married within a few months after his decease one Jean Labatie, or Labbate, as the Dutch called him, a person of French extraction, who was at the time master carpenter of the West India Company in New Amster- dam. They appear to have remained in possession of the surgeon's house on Stone Street (which occupied, it would seem, a portion of the site of the building No. 11 Stone Street, together with a few feet of that of the Produce Ex- change) till the latter part of 1652, when they sold it to Isaac de Foreest. They had also some claim to the adjoining gar- den, previously ordered to be sold by the Council, or had themselves redeemed it, for in 1654 they sold out their inter- est in that parcel to one Paulus Schrick. Labatie afterwards removed to a farm near Albany, and later became one of the first settlers at Schenectady. Isaac de Foreest and his elder brother Hendrick occupy a prominent place in the early history of New Netherland, as having been the pioneers of the settlement of Harlem. They were both young men when they came over from Leyden to New Amsterdam in 1686, — Isaac only about twenty years of age, and his brother Hendrick, though a married man, not 72 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE much older. From the rough, forest-clad hills, seamed with deep ravines, a part of which now occupy the north end of the Central Park, these two brothers, as they explored the island of the Mannhatoes, soon after their arrival, must have seen, as they looked to the northward, toward the wide salt-water estuary which we now know as Harlem River, a level expanse of some seven or eight hundred acres in area, broken only by one or two isolated rocky eminences crowned with trees. Through the midst of this ran a small fresh-water stream, and there is little doubt that portions of the plain had been long cleared and cultivated by the Indians. Here Hendrick de Foreest selected a tract of about two hundred acres, lying between the heights and the little stream flowing through the flats, and here, not very far from the present Harlem Lake in the Central Park, he commenced the erection of the first house of European settlers upon the north end of Manhattan island. Isaac de Foreest was probably an assistant of his brother in his early operations, but Hendrick soon dying, his widow married again, and the bouwery passed into the hands of strangers. Isaac de Foreest therefore sought to establish a new plantation for himself, and he secured about one hun- dred acres of ground, extending in a long, narrow strip for nearly a mile from about the present Fifth Avenue and One Hundred and Twelfth Street to the river shore in the neigh- borhood of First Avenue and One Hundred and Twenty-sixth Street. It was near the latter spot that in 1641 he had a dwelling and a large tobacco-house built by two English car- penters. He obtained a ground-brief or patent for this land in 1647. It had probably been devastated by the Indians in 1643, as most of the outlying plantations were, and whether De Foreest kept up his buildings there we do not know. In 1650 he sold the farm to Willem Beeckman ; it was selected for the site of the village of Harlem, and Isaac de Foreest's lane, or cart-path, upon the east side of his farm, became the main street of the new settlement. De Foreest himself, for some time before the last-mentioned date, had been dwelling upon the Winckel Straet in New ISAAC DE FOREEST, THE BREWER 73 Amsterdam, where he owned the house next to that of Domi- nie Bogardus, to which previous reference has been made, in these sketches. Soon after his purchase of Surgeon Van der Bogaerdt's house on Stone Street, he sold his former dwelling- house upon the Winckel Straet, and continued to make the Stone Street house his residence during most of the remainder of his life. As early as 1653, De Foreest was known as a successful brewer in New Amsterdam, and two or three years later he petitioned the Council for permission to contract for all the beer that one of his rivals in business could brew, in order to save the latter from pecuniary embarrassment. As to his place of business in the earlier years we are not in- formed, but as early as 1660 his large brewery stood upon the north side of the Prinsen Straet, now called Beaver Street, a short distance west of the modern William Street. De For- eest's brewing operations did not prevent his being engaged to some extent in public business, and in 1656 he was ap- pointed " Master of the Weigh House." This building, in- tended for the weighing, measuring, gauging, etc., of goods had been ordered to be constructed in 1653, and stood near the little dock upon Schreyers Hoek. It was afterwards re- moved to a spot upon the south side of Pearl Street, at the head of another small dock on the line of the present Moore Street, built about 1659. About the time of the surrender of New Amsterdam to the English in 1664, Isaac de Foreest incurred considerable cen- sure from a part of his fellow-citizens. It seems that while the English vessels were lying in the harbor before New Amsterdam, with their force as yet unknown, De Foreest was taken prisoner, apparently by an English detachment which hatl landed upon Long Island and which encountered him at that place. He was taken to the ships, but was soon released, and sent back to New Amsterdam ; there he reported that Colonel NicoU had a force of about eight hundred English soldiers ready to make a landing. After the surrender, it was discovered (according to the representations made by the West India Company to the States-General) that the English 74 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE only had a few more than two hundred men, — a force hardly equal in number to the garrison. There was great indignation among the soldiers of the garrison and the more patriotic Dutch citizens, and some talk of repudiating Stuyvesant's articles of surrender. The Director-General's long course of petty tyranny, however, had so alienated the mass of the citizens that they seem to have looked upon the arrival of the English as a positive relief; they would do nothing, and the others had to swallow their indignation as best they could. CHAPTER IX THE VAN CORTLANDT HOMESTEAD. — CATHERINE VAN CORTLANDT AND HER CHURCH AT SLEEPY HOLLOW.— VAN COUWENHOVENS HOUSES ON STONE STREET.— PIETE HARTGERS, THE WAMPUM COMMISSIONER UPON the north side of Stone Street there stand two unpretendmg brick warehouses of the style of half a century ago. Between their high blank walls is a narrow lane, or passageway, which seems to lead to nowhere in par- ticular, and which is closed to the street by a curious port- cullis arrangement of iron bars. The ground covered by these buildings, Nos. 13 and 15 Stone Street, and by the passageway, together with a small additional strip upon the west, forms a spot which ought to be of some interest to a good many of the citizens of New York, for it is the ances- tral site of one of their oldest families, the Van Cortlandts. From the small town of Wyck te Durstadt, a few miles southeast of Utrecht, Oloff Stevensen van Cortlandt came over to New Amsterdam in 1637 as a soldier in the service of the West India Company. Director-General Kieft, who came to the Colony in the year succeeding Van Cortlandt's arrival, seems to have taken a fancy to the young soldier, and transferred him from the military to the civil service, giving him the appointment of commissary, or superin- tendent of cargoes at the port. The direct compensation of this office was not very lucrative, however, for in 1641, his salary was raised to 30 guilders, or about $12 per month; the probabilities are that his services in the office to which he was thus appointed were only needed at the comparatively infrequent intervals of the arrival or departure of a vessel in port. At any rate, we find him at about this period with a 76 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE " plantation " on his hands near where the village of Green- wich was subsequently located, — the present Ninth Ward of the city. Probably enough, this came to him through a mortgage from one Thomas Betts, or Bescher, as he is some- times called, who seems to have occupied it for a time. This man is said to have been an Englishman, and appears to have succumbed about this time to the twofold misfortunes of an encumbered farm and a worthless wife. In the spring of 1641, Van Cortlandt leased the plantation to three persons who seem to have been Englishmen, for the rental of three hundred pounds of tobacco per year. More than by his farming investments, however, Van Cortlandt's prospects were improved by his marriage in 1642 to Anneken, sister of Govert Loockermans, the leading merchant and Indian trader of the Colony at that time. Soon thereafter he re- ceived from Director Kieft the somewhat important appoint- ment of keeper of the public store, and thenceforwards his advancement in wealth and influence was quite rapid. Van Cortlandt was living upon "the road," or Stone Street, as early as 1646, and had obtained his deed or ground-brief for the land in the preceding year. In addition to his ap- pointments under the West India Company, he was the agent for the ex-Director Van Twiller, who, upon his return to the Netherlands in about the year 1638, had retained quite extensive landed interests in the Colony. Van Cort- landt also took a prominent part in the affairs of the church at New Amsterdam, of which he was a deacon ; and mention has already been made, in a preceding chapter of this work, how Director-General Kieft induced him to bring a suit for slander against Dominie Bogardus, which suit, however, was afterwards settled amicably between the parties. Following this affair there seems to have been some diminution of Van Cortlandt's influence with the officers of government at New Amsterdam ; he was certainly out of his office of keeper of the stores as early as the spring of 1647, and in that same year he was chosen by the j)opular party of New Amsterdam as one of the representative "Nine Men," who afterwards OLOFF VAN CORTLANDT 77 drew up the historic " Remonstrance " to the States-General against the misrule of the West India Company and its officers in New Netherland. Van Cortlandt signed this docu- ment with the remarkable statement appended to his signa- ture that it was "under protest." Just what he meant by this is not entirely plain, but it appears to have been a sort of "hedging" device. The Secretary Van Tienhoven, who went over to the Netherlands for the purpose of answering the " Remonstrance," on behalf of the colonial authorities, did not fail to vilify, after his usual fashion. Van Cortlandt for his ambiguous conduct: "He has profited by the Company's service," said the Secretary, "and is endeavoring to give his benefactor the pay of the world, — that is, evil for good." Politics being unsatisfactory, Oloff van Cortlandt now appears to have given his attention more particularly to private business, and in 1648, according to Valentine, he became a brewer. No reference to the site of his brewery is found in the Dutch land records. Many years afterwards, when the Van Cortlandts had acquired much property in the Marketfield Lane, adjoining the rear of their original grant upon Stone Street, their breweries and appurtenances are referred to as large buildings apparently occupying sites in the interior of the block. The lane, or passageway, pre- viously spoken of may, indeed, have been the original ap- proach to these structures from Stone Street. As to Van Cortlandt's house, the records seem to be equally silent. Muniments of the family may possibly be in existence which could throw light upon these points, but one or two so-called descriptions of the ancient buildings which have heretofore appeared in print would appear to be entirely fanciful. Here, then, Oloff Stevensen van Cortlandt spent many of the closing years of his life. If he sometimes remembered the village of his last abode in the Netherlands and the waters of the Rhine flowing silently by it through the old Lech channel which Civilis and the Batavians had excavated more than fifteen centuries before ; if he called to mind the surrounding lowlands, yellow with the wheat harvest; and 78 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE the Amersfoort Hills beyond, — quite mountains to the Netherlanders, — where white fields of buckwheat checkered the purple of the heaths and the green of the woodlands, — he never allowed these memories to call him back to the old country, though he early acquired an ample competence for his day. He remained quietly in New Amsterdam, holding the office of Burgomaster of the city for ten years, from 1655 to 1665, and when the English made their descent upon New Amsterdam in 1664, Director-General Stuyvesant appointed him one of the commissioners to negotiate the surrender to the English. After his death in 1683, members of his family long retained this property or a portion of it, but it event- ually passed out of their hands. The " brick dwelling-house, kitchen, brew-house, malt-house, mill-house, horse-mill, out- houses, storehouses, and stables," which stood here in the next century, have all disappeared, but an edifice erected by Oloff van Cortlandt's daughter Catherine, who was a child of two or three years of age at the time of our survey, in 1655, has been more enduring. The little church of gray stone, in the building of which in 1699 she took such a lively interest, still stands, much as of old, upon the Albany post- road, near the site of the upper manor-house of her husband Frederick Phillipse, north of Tarrytown. The ancient road, somewhat widened since Catherine van Cortlandt's day, still winds around the shady knoll upon which her church stands, and climbs the hill beyond ; but the tenants of the manor, the slaves of the Phillipses, and the straggling Indian hunters who frequented it in her time have long since vanished from memory. The few slabs of brown stone scattered here and there around the church, when she passed among them, — " With slow feet, treading reverently The graveyard's springing grass," — have expanded, in the course of two centuries, to almost a " city of the dead ; " but at the foot of the knoll, the Pocantico, enriched with legendary charms by the genius of Washington Irving, flows from out its woody solitudes, as THE VAN CORTLANDT FAMILY 79 it did when the foundress of the church looked down upon it, — of whom, turning to the list of members in the records of this ancient Dutch church, we read : — " First and before all, the right honorable, God-fearing, very wise and prudent my lady Catharine Phillipse, widow of the lord Frederick Phil- lipse of blessed memory, who has promoted service here in the highest praiseworthy manner." Oloff van Cortlandt's descendants were extensive land- holders, and, either directly or by marriage, they controlled at one time all the land along the east side of the Hudson River, from the highlands above the modern Peekskill to the Spuyten Duyvil Creek, a distance of about thirty miles, and extending several miles back into the country. Their name is perpetuated in that of the town of Cortlandt in Westchester County, and in Courtlandt Street and the Van Cortlandt Park in the City of New York. The interval upon the north side of Stone Street between the Van Cortlandt house and the present Broad Street is now occupied by buildings fronting upon the latter street, but it was not so occupied originally. In the spring of 1645, Peter Wolphertsen van Couwenhoven, one of several members of a family who came from Amersfoort, only a few miles away from Oloff van Cortlandt's last dwelling-place in the Nether- lands, obtained a grant from Director Kieft of a plot of ground, nearly fifty by one hundred and twenty-five feet in area, at the corner of Stone Street and the present Broad Street, the latter being at this point, and at the time men- tioned, a mere narrow road or lane about twenty-five or thirty feet in width, and with an artificial ditch or channel skirting its east side. Here Van Couwenhoven built near the corner of the streets a modest house — one story and a garret only — which in the next year, 1646, he sold to Arnoldus van Hardenbergh. He then immediately acquired from the Director-General the grant of another parcel of about the same size, lying between the first and Van Cortlandt's gar- den, and proceeded to build another house here. This he held for several years, until 1652, when he sold it to Pieter 80 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE Hartgers, who was the owner at the period of our survey. Hartgers, who had married one of the step-daughters of Dominie Bogardus, was engaged much of his time in trading with the Indians, and occupied this house very irregularly. Finally, he appears to have taken up his residence in Fort Orange, or Albany, where he received grants of land, and where he was one of the magistrates in 1658. He acquired the reputation of a great expert as to the values of the Indian wampum, or shell money, and was appointed in 1659 a commissioner at Albany to estimate the same. His inti- mate acquaintance with the Indians led him to make long expeditions into the forests to drum up trade with them, a course of business which excited great jealousy among his less enterprising rivals. He retained the Stone Street house, but whether as a storehouse in his business, or in the occu- pation of tenants is not known. At the time of the sur- render to the English in 1664, Hartgers became obnoxious to the new government from some cause or other, — possibly from a refusal to take the oath of allegiance, — and his prop- erty was confiscated. A curious circumstance, showing the scarcity of money in the Colony, is that so late as 1659 this house was the subject of a mortgage to secure " three hun- dred and thirteen whole beaver-skins." As for the corner plot mentioned above, after its sale in 1646 to Arnoldus van Hardenbergh for 1600 guilders, or about $640 of the present currency, it appears to have be- come encumbered with debts of its owner to one Hendrick Scharf, of Amsterdam, and an arrangement was effected in the year 1652 by which the house and garden was turned over to the brother of Arnoldus, Johannes Hardenbergh, who was at that time a merchant of Amsterdam. He was the owner of this property at the time of our survey, but it is not certain whether he ever actually resided here. He died before the year 1659, in which year the place was sold by the curators of his estate, and soon after this date the garden was sold off in small lots fronting upon the Graft, or Broad Street. ;i V!' 4 A Plan of BroNwcr Straet and JHfoogh Straet in New Amsterdam from Fort Amsterdam to the Utadt Htiys A.D. f6s5 Compiled from the Dutch and English Records by J. H. INNES aral silts, or those the subject i of full txamination, appear in dotted lines. > -^ NOT.E — Conjectural sites, or those which have mt been R cfe rences : Site of original house of Adam Roelantsen. " House of the Fiscal." Brewery of the IVesI India Company. Site of l^an Couaenhoven' s Brewert, /6jS. Site of later Me/yn House. CHAPTER X THE "DITCH," OR GRAFT. — TEUNIS CRATE AND HIS HOUSES ON THE DITCH. — THE JEWS IN NEW AMSTER- DAM.— SOLOMON LA CHAIR, THE NOTARY, AND HIS TAVERN— THE BANISHMENT OF MICHIEL PICQUET Ein Jahrtausend sclion imd liiuger Dulden wir uns briiderlich ; Du, du duldest, dass ich atme, Dass du rasest, dulde ich. Jetzt wird unsre Freundschaft fester, Uud noch tiiglich nimmt sie zu ; Deiiii ich selbst begann zu rasen Und ich werde fast wie du ! Heine: "An Edom." IT required some education in the ways of the Nether- hmders to render the Graft, or the modern Broad Street, at which we have now arrived, a very desirable place of resi- dence in the year 1655. The bog or morass towards the head of the present street was known as Blommaert's, and afterwards as the Company's Vly, in the earlier days of the settlement, and had long been an eyesore to the officers of the Company. As early as 1638 it appears that measures to drain it were in contemplation; and when Director Kieft leased the land north of the present Beaver Street to Jan Damen, in the spring of that year, the curious reservation was made that " in case the Company think proper to plant vineyards or gardens in the Vly, the lessee shall permit the same." The natural outlet of this swamp was a small fresh- water run which emptied into the East River near the inter- section of Broad with the present Pearl Street, just south of which last-named street was the original shore line. Before 82 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 1643, an artificial channel or ditch had been constructed to carry off the waters of the swamp: this was only a few feet in width, and was carried along the middle of the present Broad Street; upon its west side there was left a roadway of twenty-five or thirty feet in width extending from the shore to the present Beaver Street, but upon its east side no such roadway appears to have been originally in contemplation, for the first grants of land here came in several instances quite to the ditch and consequently infringed upon the eastern half of the present Broad Street. This was the con- dition of the Graft at the period of our survey, but a little later, larger views prevailed with the Director and Council, and in 1657-59, arrangements were made with the land- holders on the east side of the Graft; a strip corresponding in size with that upon the west of the ditch was added to the street, thus bringing it to its present width, and the ditch was widened and deepened so as to form a canal extending nearly to Beaver Street, through which canal the tide ebbed and flowed. To protect the sides of this canal, it became necessary to sheathe it with planks, and this was done by the public authorities at considerable expense, and to the great dissatisfaction of the property owners along it, who made such determined opposition to the collection of the assess- ments laid upon them, that the West India Company was fain to contribute nearly half of the cost of the work in order to prevent public disturbances. Low-lying and damp as the " Ditch Street " must have been before the construction of the canal in 1657, it doubtless possessed attractions for Tennis Craie, who obtained from the Director and Council, in April, 1647, a ground-brief for a parcel of land at the southwesterly corner of the present Stone and Broad streets, being in area about thirty-seven feet front on the former street and fifty-five feet on the latter. Craie, who had come from Venlo, a small border town upon the Meuse River in Upper Gelderland, must have been among the earlier emigrants, for he had established himself TEUNIS CRAIE 83 in New Amsterdam as early as 1639, in which year, follow- ing the curious custom of the colonists and of the West India Company, he had hired, or rather leased for six years, as the legal instrument expresses it, two milch cows, im- ported from the Netherlands by the Company. The rent under this singular contract was to be fifty pounds of butter annually, and the risk of death of the cattle, and the ultimate increase of the same, were to be shared in common by Craie and the Company. In all probability he was at this time located upon some clearing outside of the village,^ for in the winter of 1642-43, just before the Indian war broke out, we find him making a contract with one Walter Davel to put a post-and-five-rail fence around his plantation. Like most of the farmers of Manhattan Island at that period, however, his plantation seems to have suffered devastation at the hands of the Indians in the war which followed Kieft's cruel and foolhardy outrages upon the latter in the early part of 1643. Driven to the village for security, we find Craie looking about for an abode there in the following summer. It was no time for building operations, but he found a small house which seems to have been in a somewhat dilapidated condition, and which stood upon the road along "The Ditch," at the northwest corner of the present Bridge and Broad streets. It was in all probability the first house built along the line of the latter street, and had been originally acquired by Abraham Ryken (the ancestor of the Rikers of later days), in company with one Jan Pietersen from Amsterdam. These persons had sold the house in the spring of 1643 to Michiel Picquet, a Frenchman from the ancient city of Rouen in Normandy. Picquet, who had a plantation on Long Island, did not purpose to occupy this small house himself, and in August, 1643, Tennis Craie, searching for a habitation at 1 This clearing appears to have occupied a portion of the tract lying along the East River, between the so-called " Great Bouwery " of the West India Company (afterwards granted to Director-General Stuyvesant) and Deutel or " Turtle " Bay; — or speaking in a general way, between the modern Twenty-first and Forty-fifth streets. This tract passed through many vicissitudes in the earlier years of the Colony. 84 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE the village, was able to hire the house of its owner at the yearly rental of 40 guilders, or about $16 ; the rent was certainly not exorbitant, but as its owner had only paid 150 guilders, or about $60, for the premises, it gave him fair returns for his investment. In addition Craie agreed "to plaster and make the house tight once," and to enclose a yard in the rear "to lay wood in." Even this humble little' cottage near the fort was looked upon in the troubled condi- tion of the times as a place of refuge. The owner stipulates in his lease to Craie that "if in consequence of enemies, Indians, or other inconveniences, necessity require Michael Picquet to lodge in said house with his family and baggage, he may do so without deduction of rent." Here, then. Tennis Craie apparently resided until he acquired the adjoining lot to the north, already spoken of, and built a house for himself in or about the year 1647. His house, which stood upon the corner of Stone Street, faced "The Ditch," or Broad Street with its gabled front, and the capacious Dutch oven in its rear about filled up the short lot. Just south of the latter appendage, and likewise upon the rear of his lot, stood his well, — a famous one in the neigh- borhood. To it, and along the south side of his house, extended a path, vv'hich subsequently, when in the course of a few years he had built another house upon the south- ern portion of his ground, and also fronting Broad Street, became a gated alleyway between the tvv^o houses, in which the formidable "drip" of the steep Dutch roofs produced a miniature cascade whenever a hard rain fell. The small house of Tennis Craie upon "The Ditch" pos- sesses some interest as having been the spot upon which the Jews first attempted to establish themselves in the rising village of New Amsterdam. The Portuguese Jews — so- called — had for a considerable period been numerous and influential in Amsterdam, where about twenty years after the period of our survey (or in 1674), they built the great synagogue, massive and imposing in its simplicity, and standing upon a commodious square, bounded on two sides THE JEWS IN NEW AMSTERDAM 85 by broad canals, the Muyder Graft and the Nieuwe Heere Graft, — 'One of the choicest locations in the city, from which it overlooked, across the latter canal, the greenhouses and trim alder hedges and beds of rare plants of the Hortus Medic us, the celebrated Botanical Garden of Amsterdam. This divi- sion of the Jews of Amsterdam known as the Portuguese, embraced, however, many of other nationalities, particularly French and Italians. They formed the aristocracy of the sect, and were moreover divided by differences of dogma from their much humbler brethren, whose modest place of worship stood at no great distance from them across the Muyder Graft, and bore the formidable appellation of the Hoogduytsse Joode Kerk, signifying, however, nothing more than the High Dutch Jewish Church, whose congregation, in addition to the High Dutch, or Germans, embraced also the Polish and Silesian Jews; they had few affiliations with the Portuguese. In so far as the Jews were merchants and capitalists, their presence was by no means unwelcome in the metropolis and larger cities of the Netherlands, where every nerve was strained to extend the commercial influence of the country; but in the colonies, largely composed of the poorer classes of emigrants, and where the competition of the Jewish traders was dreaded by the small shopkeepers, they were looked upon with much less favor; consequently, in November, 1655, when Asher Levy, a butcher by trade, who afterwards became a citizen of prominence, and who was one of the pioneers of the Jews in New Amsterdam, petitioned the Council that he might be permitted to mount guard with the other burghers (during the Indian troubles of that year), in place of paying a commutation tax levied upon him as a stranger, the privilege was not only refused by Stuyvesant and his Council, but the insulting comment was minuted upon his petition, that "if the petitioner consider himself aggrieved, he may go elsewhere." ^ 1 The first Jews to arrive in New Amsterdam came in the French bark "St. Charles," in the summer of 1654. They were brought by Jacques de la 86 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE It was about this time that Craie, possibly disturbed by the then threatening condition of affairs in the Colony, offered at public auction the southernmost of his houses on "The Ditch," or the present Broad Street. It was struck down to one Salvador d'Andradi, whose name indicates that he was one of the Portuguese Jews; the purchaser immediately made an application to the Council with the request that he might be permitted to take and register his deed for the house; permission, however, was refused by that body.^ Craie now petitioned the Council to take, by virtue of its right of pre-emption, the property off his hands at the figure bid for it at public sale, or otherwise to allow him to give his deed to the Jewish purchaser, but this was likewise refused by the Council. Craie was persistent in the matter, and on the 14th of March, 1656, having a few days before sold the house to Pieter Schabanck and Gysbert van Imbroeck, he again applied to the Council, alleging that he was then about to sail for the Fatherland, that he had been obliged to dispose of his house for a less sum than D'Andradi had offered at the auction sale a few months before, and request- Motte, the master of the vessel, from the harbor of Bahia in Brazil. They numbered, according to a statement made by one of them, Solomon Pieters, "twenty-three souls, big and little," but as to what brought this colony from the Brazils we have no information. A considerable sum remained due to the master of the " St. Charles " for their board and passage, and as the principal men among them had signed an agreement whereby they became jointly and severally liable for the whole amount, very rigorous proceedings were taken against them. An auction sale was held of their goods, and the proceeds being insufficient to discharge the indebtedness, two of them, David Israel and Moses Ambrosius, were ordered to be taken into confinement and held until the amount was made up. Among the sufferers was Asser " Leeven " or Levy, spoken of in the text ; all of his goods were sold at auction, although before the sale he had offered to pay all charges incurred by himself. The New Amsterdam Court held him, however, to be a surety for the debt of all the others. 1 Salvador d'Andradi was one of several Jewish partners who brought over a consignment of goods in the ship " Great Christopher," in the early part of 1655. The other partners were Abraham de Lucina, David Frera, Joseph Dacosta, and one other, whose name has not yet entirely died out in New York, — Jacob " Cawyn," or Cohn. They arrived just in time to be roundly taxed for the new city fortifications along Wall Street, although, as we have seen, they were not allowed to become landholders. LA CHAIR, THE NOTARY 87 ing the Council to reimburse him one half of the difference in price; his request again fell upon unsympathetic ears. Craie does not appear to have departed for the Netherlands at this time; but there is every reason to believe that his representations of this affair reached the Directors of the West India Company at Amsterdam, who promptly repudi- ated the action of Stuyvesant and the Council, and on the 14th of June, 1656, an order was made permitting the Jews to establish a "quarter" in New Amsterdam: their numbers, however, remained but small for many years. ^ As for Teunis Craie's first-built house upon the corner of Stone Street, he sold it about this time to an individual who gave him far more trouble than his Jewish purchaser of the adjoining premises, and that was to an impecunious gentle- man of the legal profession, Solomon Pietersen La Chair by name, who seems to have carried on his law office here in conjunction with a small tavern, or ale-house, to which his huysvrouw, Anneken, attended during his absence on the multifarious duties of his profession in the Colony, — duties which carried him sometimes to Breuckelen, sometimes to Gravesend and occasionally as far as Fort Orange, or Albany. For travelling facilities he seems to have made use of a small yacht. La Chair, of whom many curious particulars were brought to light by the discovery in the New York County Clerk's Office, some thirty or forty years ago, of his register of busi- ness as a notary, and who seems to be regarded by Mr. D. T. Valentine as the Father of the Bar of New York, — using of course that term in its technical and not in its vulgar sense, — was undoubtedly a man of considerable attainments, pro- fessional and otherwise, and possessed a very fair business knowledge of English. His first appearance in New Am- sterdam, so far as we are informed, was in the year 1655, when he petitioned the Burgomasters for permission to keep tavern in the house of Teunis Craie, then hired by him. 1 Their synagogue in Mill Street was not established till more than forty years after the order of Council above mentioned. 88 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE It seems very probable that he had just arrived in New Amsterdam at this time, and resorted to tavern-keeping until he might be better able to gain a footing in the practice of the more learned profession. The location he had chosen was not an unfavorable one ; as he sat at the front of his house in the intervals of busi- ness, possibly poring over one of his commentaries on the Roman-Dutch law, — in which quotations from the Mosaic code, from the Greek and Latin classics, and from the Fathers of the Church, were freely intermingled, in a manner equally ponderous and bewildering, — he had before him just at his right hand the bridge across the Ditch, or " Graft " in Broad Street, which was about midway between the present Bridge and Stone streets, and over which all persons from the Long Island ferry, as well as from the eastern part of town, must pass on their way to the Secretary's office and to the other government offices near the fort; while beyond the bridge, looking over the gardens of three or four houses along the shore, he had a clear view of anything that was going on around the City Tavern, which served also at this time as the Town Hall for public gatherings and the meet- ings of the burgomasters, and was also the seat of the ordinary courts. But, as has been already suggested, La Chair was chroni- cally impecunious: he did not pay his rent, and was sued for it; he did not pay the wages of the pilot of his yacht, and was sued for them ; he did not pay for various articles purchased by him, and was sued for the price by the sellers ; he did not pay until driven to the last ditch of resistance certain fines and taxes imposed upon him, and then he ac- companied the payment with such disparaging remarks upon the collecting officers — in one case asserting that his money was paid to no other purpose than " to have a little cock booted and spurred " — that those aggrieved individuals found it necessary to lay the matter before the Council in order to soothe their wounded feelings; much after the manner of their prototype, Dogberry : TEUNIS CRAIE'S MISFORTUNES 89 " Moreover, sir (which, indeed, is not under white and black), this plaintiff here, the offender, did call me ass. I beseech you, let it be remembered in his punishment." • In the same way, when in the early part of 1656 La Chair purchased the house he occupied of Tennis Craie, agreeing to pay for it in instalments, the sum of 2000 guilders, or about $800, — following his usual custom, he allowed him- self to be sued for the very first instalment. This seems to have been settled at the time, but two years later the owner was obliged to bring suit for the last instalment, in answer to which La Chair entered the airy plea " that the money was ready at one time, but has slipped through his fingers;" it appears, in fact, to have slipped through irrecoverably, for we soon afterwards find Craie again in possession of his house, which in 1660 he disposed of to Oloff Stevensen van Cortlandt, La Chair in the mean time having removed to another part of the town, where he died a few years later, so insolvent that the court pondered a long time as to whether a certain elaborate "gown and petticoat" of Anneken, his widow, should be sold for the benefit of his creditors, or whether they should be left to cheer the widow's heart in her second nuptials with one William Doeckles. It seems to have been the case that Tennis Craie 's opera- tions in real estate in New Amsterdam had not been very profitable to him, and he suffered a further misfortune in the fact that a woodland tract of some sixty or seventy acres, which he had acquired in 1653 upon Long Island (fronting the East River, a short distance north of the present Astoria), was rendered comparatively worthless to him for many years by the order of the Council, in 1656, forbidding isolated farms or plantations, in order to prevent depredations by the Indians. In 1673 he had obtained a judgment of 186 florins, or about $72, against Allard Anthony, the former sheriff, a man of considerable political influence; this judgment he had been unable to collect for nearly a year, and in 1674 he applied to the court for permission to levy on the goods of 90 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE the late sheriff, " earnestly entreating this Worshipful Court once again to take his most pitiable condition into considera- tion and to give order that the said Judgment may be put into execution without further delay, to the end that he may again receive his disbursed mone}^ to use it in nis old age." Craie had retained a mere slip of ground upon the south side of his original grant, and here he built one of the tiniest dwelling-houses ever erected in New York ; ^ the lot upon which it stood was less than ten feet front by about forty feet deep ; it occupied very nearly the site of the covered drive- way of the building No. 92 Broad Street, within which it might almost have stood, among the bales of hay and bags of feed now occupying that locality. Here Tennis Craie appears to have resided for a number of years, partly sup- ported by the not very lucrative official employments which Mr. Valentine enumerates as having been held by him, such as town crier, measurer of apples and onions brought to market, and tally-master of the bricks and tiles imported from Holland. In 1677, his widow Catrina conveyed the small house above mentioned to the deacons of the Reformed Church, in consideration of her support and maintenance, she being then poor and aged. She had died prior to 1682, in which year the officers of the church disposed of the property. However much Tennis Craie might have felt " The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune," he was lucky in comparison with his neighbor and former landlord, Michiel Picquet, whose humble house stood at the northwest corner of the present Bridge and Broad streets, as previously described. This man had endeavored, in his lease to Craie, as we have already seen, to guard himself against "enemies, Indians, or other inconveniences," — but he failed 1 A smaller one is, however, to be seen at present (1900) in Stone Street, upon the rear of the old Stadt Huys ground. This diminutive structure, known 3S No. 32^ Stone Street, has only about seven feet front. PICQUET PUT TO THE TORTURE 91 to provide against one of the worst inconveniences of all, — namely, that of an unbridled tongue. He appears, in fact, to have been something of what the good Dame Quickly, of Eastcheap, held in such abhorrence, — namely, a "swag- gerer." In common with most of the citizens who had suffered from the Indian wars, he entertained a bitter hatred of Director Kieft, and he appears to have been a warm partisan of his neighbor, just over " the Ditch " in Broad Street, — Cornelis Melyn, the leader of the opposition to the arbitrary despotism of Kieft and of Stuyvesant. Soon after Stuyvesant's arrival at New Amsterdam, in the early part of the summer of 1647, and before Kieft had sailed for the Netherlands on the fatal voyage of the "Princess," Picquet was accused of having berated Kieft as "a betrayer of his country, a villain and traitor; and saying if nobody would shoot him, he (said Picquet) would do it himself; that his legs should never carry him out of the country; that Cornelis Melyn had full a hundred men at his command, and there would be great bloodshed on the spot where the ex-Director surrendered his authority to General Stuyvesant; and if the latter did not behave himself better than the old Director, he, too, should pass under the door; (striking under his arm)," — a somewhat vulgar allusion to the standard method of punishment of refractory small boys. Although this style of talk was probably a fair sample of the ordinary ale-house discussions of the period, and although it was generally winked at by the authorities in the case of any person likely to have influence enough to carry his com- plaints to the home country, it was not to be endured in the case of this obscure Frenchman. Picquet was taken into custody " for that scandalous and godless act, " and was, in fact, ordered to be put to the torture, — probably for the purpose of extracting information respecting the matters hinted at in his vaporings. It should not be forgotten, in this connection, that the history of New York goes back to the time when the rack was an acknowledged feature of judicial procedure. 92 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE Some kind of settlement was made of this affair, and Picquet received Director-General Stuyvesant's pardon, but his rancor had apparently not abated, and he had profited but little by his former experience, for in a short time he was again placed under arrest, charged with saying that he would shoot the Director between his bouwery (at the present Ninth Street) and the fort. The ignorant and probably weak- minded character of this man is pretty well shown by the record of his examination taken upon this occasion. When asked what he had to say, he declared that the witnesses against him were unworthy of belief because they "had stolen watermelons and some boards. Asked if he could prove it, says he has no proof, but that God was his wit- ness." The trial of this case was attended with one public benefit; it displayed at a very early date in his administration the thoroughly hypocritical character of the new Director- General. Stuyvesant, at first, with a great parade of his vir- tue, refused to sit as a judge upon the trial on account of his personal interest in the matter. Afterwards, finding in all probability the other members of the Council too leniently disposed to suit his views, he sulkily took his seat with the others, and was the only member of the court who voted that a sentence of death should be passed upon the prisoner. The judgment of the court was sufficiently severe, however; Michiel Picquet was sentenced to be transported to Holland on the ship "Falconer," to serve a term of eighteen years' imprisonment in 't Rasphuis, the criminal prison of Amster- dam, so-called from the common occupation of the prisoners at that time in rasping the heavy Brazil wood into dust for dyeing purposes. Before the sailing of the vessel, however, the prisoner made his escape from Fort Amsterdam. The Council, with a polite attention to form, somewhat similar to that of the executioner's clownish assistant, calling the condemned criminal to execution, in " Measure for Measure " : " you must be so good, sir, to rise and be put to death," — ordered Picquet to be summoned three times "by the ringing of BANISHMENT OF PICQUET 93 the bell, to come and defend his case." That obstinate and unaccommodating individual having failed to appear, how- ever, the Council proceeded, on July 4, 1647, to do the best it could in vindication of its slighted authority by passing a further sentence of banishment against Picquet, and of con- fiscation of his property. His house at the corner of Bridge and Stone streets is soon found — probably by direct grant from the Director and Council — in the possession of Hen- drick Willemsen, a baker, who occupied the premises for many years. ^ 1 As for Picquet, he must have subsequently either surrendered himself or been captured ; for in the fall of 1647 he, together with the Scotchman, Andrew Forrester, agent of the Earl of Stirling, who had been imprisoned by the autlior- ities at New Amsterdam, for asserting his principal's claim to Long Island was sent away in the ship " Valckenier " for transportation to the Netherlands. The vessel, however, on its way, touched at an English port, and while there, both the prisonei-s made their escape. (Letter of the Directors, etc., to General Stuy- vesant, dated April 7, 1 648.) CHAPTER XI CORNELIS MELYN, PATROON OF STATEN ISLAND.— THE INDIAN TROUBLES.— JOCHEM PIETERSEN KUYTER.— THE STRUGGLES OF MELYN AND KUYTER AGAINST THE COLONIAL AUTHORITIES. — THE BARON VAN DER CAPELLEN— SIBOUT CLAESEN, OF HOORN He was one Of many thousand such that die betimes, Whose story is a fragment known to few. Then comes the man who has the luck to live, And he 's a prodigy. Compute the chances, And deem there 's ne'er a one in dangerous times Who wins the race of glory, but than him A thousand men more gloriously endowed Have fallen upon the course ; a thousand others Have had their fortunes foundered by a chance, Whilst lighter barks pushed past them. Taylor : " Philip Van Artevelde." IT has been already stated that the bridge over the little stream in Broad Street was originally a short distance — some fifty feet or thereabouts — north of Bridge Street. This location carried the road towards the ferry around a parcel of land situated upon the river shore, upon which stood the house of a man who for half a score of years filled a very conspic- uous position in the public eye, — Cornelis Melyn, of Antwerp.^ There is something about the determined character of Cornelis Melyn, and the long struggle which he candied on against the petty despots who represented the authority of the 1 The name Melyn, like so many others of the modern family names among persons descended from a Germanic ancestry, is quite likely to have been derived from some former place of residence of the family, which in this case, it is not improbable, was the village of Melin, about sixty miles southeast of Antwerp, in the direction of Maestricht, from which it is not far distant. ANTWERP IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 95 West India Company in New Amsterdam, which lends an air of historic dignity to the man, and marks liim as one of the first of a long line of champions in the colony, of individual rights, as against arbitrary and irresponsible power. He came naturally by his hatred of despotism. At his native Antwerp, in the first half of the seventeenth century, he could have talked with men who remembered when it was not unusual for two thousand vessels or more to be lying in the port of that city, or for a hundred to sail up the Scheldt with each favoring tide. They could have told him of misfortune after misfortune under the Spanish rule, of wars and grinding taxes, of the introduction of the Inquisition, of the dreadful sack of the city by the mutinous Spanish garrison in 1576, when six thousand of the citizens perished by the sword, by fire, and by water ; and he himself could have seen how the growth of the commerce of Amsterdam, after its emancipation from the Spanish incubus, had drawn away to itself the trade and the most enterprising of the tradesmen of Antwerp. Now, as he trod the streets of the city, their spaciousness contrasted strangely with the soUtude that reigned in them ; he passed by quaint old mansions, of which the half were closed and uninhabited; but few vessels were to be seen now in the Scheldt or along the canals, and upon the quays the grass grew ; the busy crowds had forsaken the great Exchange, and there were seen there now "little more than peddlers and fishwomen." There was one spot in the city which must have stirred strongly the feehngs of Cornelis Melyn, and that was where a tall crucifix of gilt bronze, marked, according to story, the site of the insulting statue erected half a century before, by order of the bloody Duke of Alva, where he himself, in full armor, was shown as trampling upon two prostrate figures, designed to represent the lords and commons of Flan- ders. The statue had perished long before in a tumult of the indignant citizens, but the memory of it was not likely soon to fade away in the decaying city. And yet Antwerp still retained much of its former charm : " A gilded halo, hovering round decay," 96 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE which had induced John Evelyn, visiting it about this time, to speak of it in his diary as " sweete Antwerp " — " nor did I ever observe a more quiet, cleane, elegantly built and civil place than this magnificent and famous citty of Antwerp." From the well-known station of view across the Scheldt, called, " Het Vlaamshe Hoofd," the Point of Flanders, and seen in a bright afternoon, when the rays of the declining sun threw into light and shadow the quaint carvings of the old mansions, of the churches and public buildings, and of the wonderful spire of the cathedral, towering more than three hundred feet above them all, the city lay stretched along the Scheldt like a gilded pageant. Within the city, too, still dwelt men of genius and of learn- ing ; indeed, in Melyn's day, Antwerp had attained the height of its great artistic fame, and he may have often seen or talked with Rubens, Van D3'ke, and Teniers, chief of a long line of predecessors and of followers in the painters' art. Still, what- ever pleasant memories might cluster about the old city, its prospects under foreign rule were becoming darker and darker ; and Cornelis Melyn, a man of competent means and past his younger years, — he was born about the year 1602, — deter- mined, doubtless not without some pangs, to try his fortunes in the New World. Leaving his family in Europe, he sailed for New Amsterdam in 1639. Here his attention was attracted to the rounded, forest-clad hills and intervales of Staten Island, and to its wide plains, upon which only one or two grants of land, and those of no great extent, had as yet been made. He sent an application next year to Amsterdam for a grant from the West India Company to himself of the remainder of the island. This was favorably entertained, and he thereupon brought on liis family from the Netherlands and set to work vigorously to take the arduous steps necessary for developing his tract. In 1642 he received his ground-brief or patent for the island, upon which he had already established a number of settlers, among whom, as it is supposed, he himself resided. The period in which Melyn began the clearing for his plan- tations upon Staten Island was an inauspicious one. The good THE RARITAN INDIANS 97 understanding which had prevailed between the Dutch and the native Indians for many years after the first settlement of the former had begun to be seriously disturbed as the colonists grew stronger and became more aggressive. It was in the year 1640, and in all probability soon after Melyn had made his application to the West India Company for land upon Staten Island, that a party of Raritan Indians, whose haunts were upon that island and upon the mainland in the vicinity of the river which still bears their name, was charged with having committed some petty depredations upon the plantation of David Pietersen de Vries, who had already commenced a clear- ing upon the grant of land he had obtained on the island. To punish the savages for this affair (which appears to have been greatly exaggerated, even if the charges were not wholly untrue), Kieft, who seems to have been painfully conscious that he had done nothing as yet to distinguish himself in his office, now determined to send an expedition against these Indians. The party was headed by Secretary Van Tienhoven, whose treacherous and cruel disposition was well adapted for matters of this kind. The force numbered seventy men, and taking the Indians by surprise at their villages — which seem to have been in the neighborhood of the present Perth Amboy, or Woodbridge — they slaughtered several of the savages, and burned the crops in their fields. Van Tienhoven and his band of Dutch warriors returned to New Amsterdam, it is true, unharmed and in high feather after this feat ; but the " heathen " Raritans, as Kieft was fond of calling them, were upon one point just about as fully enlightened as their Christian ene- mies. They understood thoroughly the lex talionis, and they had, moreover, abundant opportunities for putting it in prac- tice. They soon found their opportunity, and attacked the lonely plantation of De Vries upon Staten Island, where they killed four of his tobacco planters, destroyed the crops, and fired the buildings. The parties were now in one sense quits ; the Indians were henceforth upon their guard, and any further expeditions against them were not likely to be attended by success. In this emergency Kieft bethought himself of hiring 98 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE the other Indians to murder the Raritans ; the Council makes a report on the 4th of July, 1641 : " Wherefore, considering the circumstances, we have adopted the means which seem to us best suited to the emergency, viz. : To secure the help of our Indian allies in their (the Raritans') neighborhood, over whose territory the enemy must cross," — that is, in attempt- ing to reach New Amsterdam, — " and who may stop them in their wild forays, or at least give timely notice of their ap- proach. And in order to encourage them the more, and lure them with greater ardor to espouse our cause, we engaged to pay them, for every head of a Raritan, ten fathoms of sewant," — worth about seventeen dollars of the present currency, — " and for every head of any of those who murdered our people on Staten Island, twenty fiitlioms of sewant." These measures had little effect except to further enrage the Indians against Kief t and the Dutch. It was under these inauspicious circum- stances that Cornelis Melyn began his settlement upon Staten Island. He seems to have remained unmolested by the Indians for a considerable time, and this was doubtless owing to the numerical strength of his colony. We have no exact infor- mation upon this point, but as he had spent large sums of money in furnishing stock and implements, he had undoubt- edly secured a goodly number of colonists. At tliis period he was evidently in harmony with Director-General Kieft, who apparently had private business relations with him. Indeed, it is said that his refusal to admit Kieft to full part- nership in his Staten Island venture was one of the causes of the Director-General's bitter hatred of him afterwards, — though this is abmidantly explained by other causes. In the mean time, trouble was threatened in another quar- ter. This grew out of the murder, in the summer of 1641, of Claes Cornelissen Swits, commonly known as Claes Rade- maker, or Claes the wheelwright, by an Indian of the Weck- quaskeek tribe of Indians, inhabiting the shores of the Hudson, in the lower part of the present Westchester County. The murder is supposed to have been an act of private re- KIEFT'S PLANS AGAINST THE INDIANS 99 venge for the slaying and robbery of an uncle of the mur- derer many years before, by some of the lawless Europeans infesting the settlement, the Indians having failed to obtain any redress from the Dutch authorities. A prompt demand was made upon the tribe for the surrender of the murderer of Claes Cornelissen. This, however, was not complied with, the Indians claiming, probably enough with truth, that he was out of their reach. At this time, according to the Memorial afterwards pre- sented to the West India Company, on behalf of the people of New Amsterdam, " a hankering after war had wholly seized on the Director," and the affair of Swits seems to have afforded Kieft a long sought for opportunity to carry out his plans. It is rather difficult to understand the tortuous policy of this man. That he was desirous of ridding the vicinity of New Amsterdam of the troublesome native tribes and of get- ting possession of their lands as one of the fruits of conquest, is quite evident ; on the other hand, making due allowance for the blind arrogance so frequently shown in dealings by individuals of a so-called " dominant race " in their dealincrs with a supposed inferior one, Kieft must have been well aware that acts of violent and wholesale aggression against the Indians would inevitably be resented by them, and that in such case their power of inflicting injury upon the scat- tered colonists and their farms would be most formidable. It is difficult to reach any other conclusion than that the Di- rector-General meant, from the first, to entrap the neighboring Indians and to exterminate them at one blow, if possible, trusting that, afterwards, distance and dissensions among the tribes would prevent retaliation from the remoter Indians. The business was by no means an easy one, however. If he succeeded, he miglit doubtless expect to go down to pos- terity as a hero and a great promoter of civilization ; but, on the other hand, if he should fail, and disastrous results to the colony should ensue, there would be a heavy account to settle with his superiors, the West India Company. Under these circumstances, he craftily determined to try to implicate the : L.crc. 100 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE whole body of colonists in the onslauglit he was preparing to make upon the Indians, and to make it appear that he was merely acting at their instance and request, thus re- lieving himself from liability for the bloody experiment. Accordingly, on the 29th of August, 1641, the " heads of families " in New Amsterdam, who had previously had un- commonly little to say about the affairs of the community, were startled by having certain propositions publicly sub- mitted for their discussion by the benevolent Director- General and his Council, to the following effect: " 1. If it is not just that the murder lately committed by a savage upon Claes Swits be avenged ; and in case the Indians will not surrender the murderer, if it is not just to destroy the whole village to which he belongs ? " 2. When and in what manner this should be executed ? " 3. By whom can it be effected? " The occasion was a momentous one : the citizens met and appointed a committee of twelve, composed of some of the most energetic individuals among them, this committee form- ing the somewhat celebrated body known as "the Twelve Men;" at their head was Coi'nelis Melyn. Most of tlie members of this body were men who had much at stake in the event of hostilities with the natives. They appear to have understood Kieft's design from the first, but their posi- tion was a difficult one : if they should advise the Director and Council against attempting to enforce by violence their claims against the Indians, they knew that they would be charged at once with pusillanimity, lack of patriotism, and disaffection to the government by the Director and his Council, following the usual custom of those in authority when tlieir line of governmental action, (no matter how unjust, impracticable, or dangerous it may be), is opposed or criticised by the sub- ject : furthermore, it might have a bad effect upon the natives to place themselves formally upon record as being opposed to the employment of force. Accordingly, with all these things in view, they drew up, in the fall of the same year, 1641, an answer to the Director's ques- COMMITTEE OF "THE TWELVE MEN" 101 tions, in which answer considerable astuteness was displayed. In this document the Committee, while assenting to the use of force if necessary against the Indians, recommend many safe- guards in the way of peaceable demands, mild demeanor towards the natives, etc., and linally an expedition against them (prob- ably for the purpose of securing hostages), when the Indian warriors should be absent on their hunting expeditions. The sting to the Director-General, however, lay in the following clause : " That as the people recognize no other head than the Director-General, therefore they prefer that he should lead the van, while they, on their part, offer their persons to follow his steps and to obey his commands." The Director-General had been outwitted: the answer of " the Twelve > Men " was coldl}^ received by him, and no measures of importance were taken for a considerable period against the Indians. Melyn and his committee, however, proceeded further, and therein seems to lie their great mis- take. In their appointment by the people, though it had really been made only for a special and limited purpose, they thought they saw an opportunity for establishing a popular voice in the affairs of the colony, which had hitherto been entirely lacking. Accordingly, on the 21st of January, 1642, " the Twelve Men " sent in a petition to the Director-General, designating themselves as " Selectmen on behalf of the Com- monalty of New Netherland," — and praying for a redress of certain grievances ; they requested that " the Council shall from this time be rendered complete in members, especially as the council of a small village in Fatherland consists of five and seven schepens ; that, from now henceforth, the Director and Council do not try any criminals, unless five Councillors be present, inasmuch as the Commonalty talk considerably about it ; " they further request that representa- tion should be had in the meetings of the Council, " so that taxes may not be imposed on the country in the absence of the Twelve." Kieft was furious ; the body which he had created to further his own crooked designs had not only thwarted him 102 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE in them, but now was insolently attempting to interfere in his favorite method of government, wliich was the absolute con- trol of affairs by himself, with two or three dependent and obsequious councillors to use as " buffers," to protect himself from injury; a few days after the receipt of this petition, he made a brusque order, forbidding " the Twelve Men " from holding any further meetings.^ Matters ran along in this way until the following winter, when the Weckquaskeek Indians, fleeing before the raid of the Mohawks from the north, sought refuge in the vicinity of New Amsterdam, as has been already noticed.^ Kieft was now in high spirits : his long-sought opportunity for exter- minating the Indians was at hand; he seems to have per- suaded himself that Providence had been playing directly into his hands, but still he did not wish to rely entirely upon Providence ; he must have some means of implicating the people at large in the business ; but this was not an easy matter, since he had forbidden the committee which they had appointed from holding any meetings, and he knew very well that if he should call them together again, they would in all probability disapprove of a general massacre of the Indians. He concluded, under these circumstances, to adopt what was perhaps one of the most impudent tricks ever devised by men in authority to try to give an appearance of justification to their own unwarrantable acts. There was much public gos- sip respecting a certain Shrovetide dinner, about this time (February, 1643), at the farmhouse, on Broadway near the present Pine Street, of Jan Damen, — one of the Committee 1 "February 8th, 1642. — Whereas the Commonalty, at our request, appointed The Twelve to communicate their good counsel and advise on the subject of the murder of Switz, and this being now completed we do hereby thank them for the trouble they have taken, and shall, with God's help, make use of their rendered written advice in its own time. . . . The said twelve men shall now henceforth hold no further meeting, as tlie same tends to a dangerous consequence and to the great injury, both of the country and our authority. We do therefore hereby forbid them calling any manner of assemblage or meeting, except by our express order, on pain of being punished as disobedient subjects." 2 See page 22, ante. MASSACRE OF THE INDIANS 103 of Twelve, — at which were present, with Kieft, Cornells van Tienhoven, the secretary, and Abraham Verplanck (two of the sons-in-law of Damen), and Maryn Adriaensen, a sort of dependant and debtor of the latter ; at this dinner the Shrove pancakes were, it was said, washed down with mysterious toasts to the success of some great enterprise which was on foot. However this may be, a petition was entered upon the minutes of the Council in the following remarkable terms : To the Honorable Willem Kieft, Director-General of New Nether- land, and his Honorable Council : — The whole of the freemen respectfully represent that though heretofore much iunoceut blood was spilled by the savages without having had any reason or cause therefor, yet your Honors made peace on condition tliat the chiefs should deliver the murderer into our hands (either dead or alive), wherein they have failed up to the present time : the reputation which our nation hath in other countries has thus been diminished, even notwithstanding innocent blood calleth aloud to God for revenge ; we therefore request your Honors to be pleased to authorize us to attack the Indians as enemies, whilst God hath delivered them into our hands; for which purpose we offer our persons. This can be effected at one place by the freemen, and at the other by the soldiers. Your Honor's Subjects, (Signed) Maryn Adriaensen Jan Jansen Damen Abm Planck. (Lower stood) By their authority Corns van Tienhoven, Secretary. The savage massacre of the Indians followed, and then the swift retaliation upon the Dutch, which in the course of a few months reduced the thirty or forty farmhouses on Man- hattan Island to four or jfive which still remained standing, and which drove in the survivors of the Indian depredations to dwell in " huts of straw " around Fort Amsterdam. The number of colonists at Cornells Melyn's settlement upon 104 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE Staten Island seems to have retarded its fate for a time. It was still unattacked as late as October, 1643, though " hourly expecting an assault," — which soon afterwards came, and left it a desolate waste. Melyn had, in the mean time, removed his family to New Amsterdam, and sought out a place of abode there. East of " the Ditch " in Broad Street lay a low rise of land along the East River ; towards the shore, it terminated in a crumbling bank of no great height, above the stony beach, and at a distance of about two hundred and fifty feet back from the shore, it fell away into a low and damp depres- sion, whicli formed an easterly arm to the swamp occupying the vicinity of Broad Street, and which was called, in the early days of the colony, " Blommaert's Vly," as has already been stated. Along the middle of this low ridge, the officers of the Company had established the road leading out from the bridge to the ferry to Long Island. It soon acquired the name of Hoogh Straet, — the High Street; after the sur- render to the English in 1664, it gradually came to be called Duke's Street, in honor of the Duke of York ; and at present it forms the easterly portion of Stone Street, being nearly a continuation of the street originally known by that name. Upon the south side of this street, just west of the present Coenties Alley, and situated well back towards the shore, the Director and Council had erected, in 1641, the commodious building known as the Great Tavern, afterwards in part used as the Town Hall, of which further notice will be taken here- after. From the present Broad Street to the Great Tavern, all the land lying between the Hoogh Straet and the shore had been taken up, at an early date, by two individuals, one of whom was Burger Jorissen, a man of prominence in the town, who had built a house here, and i-eceived a ground-brief for it in 1643 ; he occupied a plot of about one hundred and thirty-five English feet frontage, next adjoining the tavern. The other occupant was located upon a much smaller plot, about at the corner of the present Broad Street ; this was one Eben Reddenhaus, a German from the principality of Waldeck, ^ ^i H «4H fe O -n; 73 ^ ^1 (D - t> H ij 2 H o Ci .^ -t! > A ^ K rt ^ ;o O 3 ^ ^ C/2 ^ a ,/^ J> «j •—1 2 P^ •r. H H-j v; < £ !^ ^ K 2 K 5 H ^ c5~ _-0 c CS^^^bJJ nil I c S %- ^ S S il if? cj ■«!;!!L CORNELIS MELYN'S HOUSE 105 who had recently (in 1641) married in New Amsterdam, and built a house here, but who died soon afterwards. There remained but one more available parcel along the river in this vicinity, and that one covered the end of the present Broad Street, at that time (as already stated) not designed to be kept open as a street. Of this parcel, Cornelis Melyn received a ground-brief in 1643 ; it was about sixty-two English feet in front along the road, which with the bridge lay north of it, and it extended in depth about eighty-eight English feet to the river shore ; through it the stream or ditch from Blom- maerts Vly ran into the East River. Here, then, Cornelis Melyn built his house, evidently a modest one, designed only for occasional use in troublesome times. It would appear to have been a two-story house of small size ; in all probability built of brick. This house was removed about 1657, when the authorities determined to change the ditch in Broad Street into a " Graft," or canal, with a roadway on each side of the same ; its location appears to have been in the easterly half of the present Broad Street, midway between Stone and Pearl streets. Desiring to con- trol more land in this vicinity than his original small plot, Melyn bought, in August, 1644, from the widow of Eben Reddenhaus, for the sum of 250 guilders, or about $100, her house and ground, and in December of the same year, from Burger Jorissen, his house and larger parcel for 950 guilders, or $380, so that he now owned all the land along the river from " the Ditch " to the City Tavern. Melyn's residence in New Amsterdam, taken in conjunc- tion with the forlorn condition of the colonists, seems to have stimulated him to more active exertions. In the fall of 1643, he, with his associates, then known from their number as " the Eight Men," addressed Memorials both to the States-General of the Netherlands and to the West India Company, setting forth the melancholy state of their affairs, and depicting in vivid colors the ravages of the Indians ; they tell how " daily in our houses and fields have they cruelly murdered men and women, and with hatchets and tomahawks struck little chil- 106 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE dren dead in their parents' arms or before their doors, or car- ried them away into bondage ; the^houses and grain barracks are burnt with the produce ; cattle of all descriptions are slain and destroyed, and such as remain must perish this approach- ing winter for want of fodder. Almost every place is aban- doned. . . . We wretched people must skulk with wives and little ones that still survive in poverty together, in and around the fort at the Manhattans, where we are not safe even for an hour." These Memorials, however, contained something in the nature of a threat, which, while it was natural enough under the circumstances, was probably not well advised: " Should suitable assistance not arrive (contrary to our ex- pectations), we shall through necessity, in order to save the lives of those who remain, be obliged to betake ourselves to the English at the East, who would like nothing better than to possess this place." These suggestions, though possibly they may not have had much effect upon the members of the States-General, seem to have sunk deeply into the minds of some of the Directors of the West India Company, and to have created with them a prejudice against the memorialists, which afterwards bore bitter fruit for the latter. In the mean time, Kieft had been bestirring himself to clear away the odium for the Indian massacre from his name, and to make it appear that it had been the work of the people, in opposition to his own personal views ; and he had sent ac- cordingly to the West India Company a pamphlet containing a rdsum^ of the whole affair, which pamphlet, according to Dominie Bogardus, " contained more lies than lines." The effrontery of the man was so amazing that in 1644 Melyn and his associates determined to send a private communication or memorial to the West India Company directing their atten- tion to the falsehoods which Kieft was endeavoring to dis- seminate. This document, bearing date 28th October, 1644, though drawn up under circumstances of great provocation, contained much vituperation of Kieft and his advisers, and proved to be the source of much trouble for Cornells Melyn, who was considered, probably with justice, as having been its author. CAPTAIN KUYTER 107 Although the proceedings of " the Eight Men " were con- ducted with secrecy, and though Kieft does not appear to have been aware for a considerable period of the communi- cation of 1644 to the West India Company, there seems to have been early manifested a bad state of feeling on his part towards Cornells Melyn, which displayed itself in various petty annoyances towards the latter. In 1645, he was charged by the fiscal with having sold wine to the Indians, but nothing appears to have come of the affair. Melyn had at this time leased about two acres of ground from the officers of the Company, covering the site of the present Trinity Church and the northern portion of the churchyard, and extending to the river bank. This he employed for the purpose of raising grain, evidently for his family use. On the 31st of May, 1646, Kieft and his Council, pettishly alleging that Melyn, " having planted and fenced a piece of land north of the Company's garden, taking in more ground than belonged to him, sweeping away with a curve behind said garden, and making use of the sods and earth of the Company's soil for security of said land," ordered that " he may cut his grain, and then deliver up the Company's ground in the same con- dition as in the Spring." In the mean time, Cornells Melyn acquired, at about this period, a neighbor who was to prove a faithful ally to him, and whose fortunes were to be bound up together with his own for several years to come. This was the worthy Captain Jochem Pietersen Kujiier, an ex-sea-captain in the Danish service, and one of the pioneers of the settlement at Harlem. The humble cottage of Eben Reddenhaus, which had been bought by Melyn, as above stated, and which stood near the northeast corner of the present Pearl and Broad streets, was in a siiort time sold by him to one Seger Teunissen. This man was soon afterwards killed by the Indians, and upon the West India Company's officers taking charge of his property, they found in a trading " yacht " belonging to him certain goods which had not been entered with the revenue officials. Kieft, in pursuance of his usual arbitrary course of 108 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE conduct, and, as was claimed, without any form of trial, and in disregard of the rights of Teunissen's widow, immediately ordered his property to be confiscated and sold ; and it is supposed that it was under these proceedings that the house on the shore of the East River was purchased by Jochera Pietersen Kuyter, who took up his residence there, after his farmhouse near the Harlem River had been destroyed by the Indians in 1644. Jochem Pietersen Kuyter was a native of the District of Ditmarssen, that portion of the Duchy of Holstein which lies on the German Ocean, between the mouths of the Elbe and the Eyder rivers, the broad flat meadows of which district, well stocked with the black and white cattle of the country, the passenger, coming down the Elbe from Hamburg, may see stretching away to his right. There was much in the situation and prospects of Kuyter that was similar to those of Cornells Melyn. Like the latter, he was a man of education and of some means, who had come over in the year 1639, well furnished with cattle, implements, and labor for commencing a plantation on a fairly large scale. As an energetic colonizer, in the prime of his activity, — he was born about 1597, — he was much courted and favored by the West India Company, which desired to attract such men to its colony. With him came his friend Jonas Bronck, from whose bouwery north of the Harlem, the Bronx River, which flowed near it, received its name, and thence the important division of New York City known as the Borough of the Bronx. With his farmers and herdsmen, Kuyter settled on the opposite side of the Harlem River from his friend Jonas Bronck, upon a tract of nearly four hundred acres of fine farming land, of which he had obtained a grant from the West India Company. This tract stretched along the Harlem River from about the present One Hundred and Twenty- seventh to One Hundred and Fortieth streets, and was com- monly known, long after his memory had faded away among men, as " Jochem Pieter's Flats ; " Kuyter liimself called it " Zegendaal," or " Vale of Blessing." Although much of his STUYVESANT'S ARRIVAL 109 time away from the settlement and at the other end of Man- hattan Island, he interested himself in the progress of the village, and in 1642 was one of the " kerkmeesters " chosen to oversee the erection of the new church in the fort ; not, says Riker in his " History of Harlem," without an eye to the services of his workmen, " who were skilled and w^ould pre- pare the timber." By this time his plantation was well established and was yielding good returns of tobacco. Con- scious of its exposed position, he, hke most of the Board of Twelve Men (of which he was a member), was averse to using violent measures with the Indians, and he foretold to Kieft the quick retribution wliich would ensue for their massacre. His own bouwery house, being well palisaded about, escaped the first devastations of the Indians, but on the 5th of March, 1644, he being then absent from the farm, the buildings, though guarded, were set on fire in the night and destroyed by the savages. Like Melyn, Kuyter was now forced to seek an abode for himself in the village of New Amsterdam, and in this way apparently he came to purchase the small house at the corner of Broad and Pearl streets, already spoken of. Henceforth, he and Cornehs Melyn were closely associated in their rela- tions towards Kieft and towards his successor, Director- General Stuyvesant. This latter person, who had taken the place of Kieft by appointment from the West India Company in 1646, had been long looked for, and in May, 1647, he arrived at New Amsterdam. Most of the inhabitants of the town were as- sembled on Schreyers Hoek and at the little dock when the new Director- General landed ; and they accompanied him to the fort, where Kieft was ready to surrender the government. In doing so, he, with great assurance, thanked the citizens for the attaclunent and fidelity they had always shown to him, and requested their formal indorsement of his administration. On all sides a loud shout of dissent went up from the crowd, half of whom, probably, had been ruined as the result of his atrocious Indian pohcy; and Melyn and Kuyter declared 110 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE roundly that they had nothing to thank liini for, and no approval to give. This scene seems to have made a deep impression upon one person at least, and that one was the new Director-General. It was not that he approved of Kieft's conduct toward the Indians ; on the contrary, he believed in giving the latter just and conciliatory treatment, not so much, in all probability, on account of the absolute right of the matter, but by reason of tha power possessed by the natives of doing harm to the col- ony. Like most despotical-minded men placed in positions of considerable power, however, Stuyvesant entertained a profound jealousy of those who would be likely to criticise his acts or to attempt to thwart his will, and such men he saw at once in Cornells Melyn and in Jochem Pietersen Kuyter, and he undoubtedly entered upon his administration with a hearty hatred of them. His hatred was not long in showing itself. Within a few days after Kieft had delivered up his office, Melyn and Kuyter, as representatives of the old board known as " the Eight I\Ien," brought a formal complaint against Kieft, and asked for an inquiry into the abuses of his late government, and respecting his treatment of the Indians. They received a prompt answer from Stuyvesant that he considered the de- nials of the late Director-General as of more weight than any evidence his antagonists could bring to support their charges ; he would recognize them in no political capacity, but consid- ered them merely as " perturbators of the public peace." The Director-General and Council accordingly dechned to entertain their complaint. Melyn and Kuyter had in fact ventured upon very danger- ous ground. Unwittingly they had come before a magistrate as thoroughly prejudiced as any judge that ever sat upon a bench of justice, ministering to his own interests and passions while making pretences of doing equity. At the time of their private communication to the West India Company, respecting Kieft, in October, 1644, Peter Stuyvesant had been admitted as one of the Directors of that Company. No direct TRIAL OF MELYN AND KUYTER 111 action appears to have been taken in the matter by the "West India Company, but when Stuyvesant came from the Nether- lands in the spring of 1647, he brought to Kieft a copy of the letter of "the Eight Men," which seems to have been the first information Kieft had received of that communication. Tliorouglily enraged, and very sure of his judge, Kieft, on June 19, 1647, brought criminal cliarges against Melyn and Kuyter for libel and for inducing the rest of " the Eight Men " to join in a false statement to the West India Company. Small grace was allowed to the accused men by Stuyvesant. They were ordered to file their answer to tlie cliarges within twenty-four hours. A small extension of time must have been granted to them, however, for their answer bears date June 22, 1647. In this document they boldly reiterate the charges, and offer to bring forward the four survivors of the " Board of Eight Men," to testify that as a matter of fact they had signed the charges against Kieft of their own will, and not through any influence of the persons accused. In reply to Kieft's demand that they should be sent to the Neth- erlands "as pests and seditious persons," tliey aver their wil- lingness to go there " as good patriots and proprietors in New Netherland." Stuyvesant's previous conduct had taught them what they had to expect from him, and they made no attempt to conciliate him ; on the contrary, tlieir answer contains a most cutting as well as just allusion to " the meanness and cowardice of those in authority who insult those who dare not answer them." They had undoubtedly determined, in anticipation of Stuyvesant's decision, to carry their cause before the States-General of the Netherlands. The decision of Stuyvesant and his Council was not long delayed. On the 25th of July, 1647, Jochem Pietersen Kuy- ter, one of whose atrocious acts consisted in "raising his finger in a threatening manner " to Kieft, was sentenced to three years' banishment and a fine of 150 guilders ; while Melyn was found guilty of an assortment of crimes, embrac- ing treason, bearing false witness, and libel and defamation ; he was sentenced to seven years' banishment and a fine of 112 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 300 guilders ; Stuyvesant was exceedingly loath to let Melyn escape out of his clutches, and pleaded hard in the Council for a sentence of death upon him, citing in support of his views many pedantic quotations from the Hebrew and Roman Law ; but the Council, though disposed to be sufficiently ob- sequious, could not be brought to vote for the death penalty. Stuyvesant, in fact, seems to have had some forebodings of future trouble from Melyn and Kuyter, but as they could not be legally put to death, and as it would have been a constant source of danger to have kept them in confinement in New Amsterdam, where they were both very popular, he had to let them go, contenting himself with malignantly observing to Melyn, " If I were persuaded you would appeal from my sentences, or divulge tliem, I would have your head cut off, or have you hanged on the highest tree in New Netherland." Did these things bring to the mind of Cornelis Melyn the statue of Alva at Antwerp with his foot upon the necks of the Estates of Flanders ? It was an old story ! This petty despot in the fort at New Amsterdam only showed the same traits, upon his small stage, as the tyrants whom the men of the Low Countries had fought for generations upon a larger field. Stuyvesant's notions of authority were only those of the Count of Flanders : " The Lion stirred and awoke with a snort, And he swelled with rage till his breath came short : ' Ere the brown leaf meet with the fiake of snow On the roundabout stair, to Ghent I '11 go. " ' For a little bird sang, and I dreamed as well, That the men of Ghent were as false as hell ; Coming by stealth when naught I feared, They trod on my toes and pulled my beard.' " Ere a snowflake fell, the Lion he went. And he roared a roar at the Gates of Ghent ; The gates they shook, though they were fast barred, And the warders heard it at Oudenarde. " At the very first roar, ten thousand men Fell sick to death ; he roared again, And the blood of twenty thousand flowed By the bridge of Roone, as broad as the road. MELYN AND KUYTER SAIL 113 "Wo worth thee, Ghent! if having heard The first and second, thou bidest the third. Flat stones and awry, grass, potsherd, and shard, — Thy place shall be like an old chmxhyard." Only about three weeks remained for Melyn and Kuyter to settle their affairs, to make ready such documents as they could with safety, to lay before the States-General upon the appeal which they had determined to make, and to prepare for their long absence, if unsuccessful in their endeavors. The ship " Princess," upon which they must depart, lay in the harbor taking in her cargo, and was announced to sail about the middle of August. The intervening time doubtless wit- nessed many long and earnest consultations at the two small houses between "the ditch" and the river shore. On the 11th of July of this year, 1647, Melyn had made a deed (probably in anticipation of the storm which was brewing) of his house in the present Broad Street to his eldest daughter, Cornelia, who on April 30 of the same year had married Cap- tain Jacob Loper, a Swede of Stockholm by birth, but who for some time had held a naval appointment in the Dutch service. Finally, on the 17th of August, 1647, Melyn and Kuyter, together with Kieft, Dominie Bogardus, and several other prominent characters of New Amsterdam, sailed from that town as previously mentioned,^ on the fatal voyage of the " Princess," Melyn being accompanied by a young son. The voyage could not have been marked by much cordiality be- tween the ex-Director-General and the men whom he had harassed by his prosecutions ; but when the " Princess " struck upon the rocks near Swansea, the near approach of death seems to have had an illuminating effect upon the mind of Kieft : " Friends," he said, with a sigh, to Kuyter and Melyn, " I have been unjust towards you ; can you for- give me ? " Cornells Melyn was one of the few who escaped death in the shipwreck, but his son was drowned. As for Kuyter, he 1 See ante, page 27. 114 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE told how he had lashed himself to a portion of the after deck of the vessel, and how when the fii'st dim light broke after that night of horror, he had discovered himself to be alone upon the floating fragment, except for what he took to be another person likewise lashed fast. Speaking, and receiving no answer, he concluded that the man was dead ; it turned out to be a cannon, which with the wreck and Kuyter was thrown by the violent surf upon the beach, where, breaking from its lashings it was found, — to their utmost amazement, — by the miners of Glamorgan and Caermarthen shires, who crowded to the spot as soon as it was day, and who afterwards set up the cannon as a memorial of the wonderful event. Melyn and Kuyter afterwards caused the sea in the vicinity of the wreck to be dragged for their chests, and in this way they were fortunate enough to recover a portion of their valuable papers. Reaching the Netherlands from England towards the close of the year 1647, tliey immediately pro- ceeded to lay their case before the States-General, at the Hague. They found that body favorably disposed towards them;^ their misfortunes had attracted public attention to them to a much greater degree than they were likely other- wise to have received; furthermore, the government of tlie Netherlands was by no means averse from exercising a re- vision over the affairs of the West India Company ; and the whole prosecution of the criminal proceedings had been disposed of with such manifest injustice toward the con- demned persons that the States-General acted with little delay, and on the 28th of April, 1648, it issued an order, in the form of a mandamus, permitting an appeal to be had by Melyn and Kuyter from the criminal judgments pronounced against them by Director Stuyvesant and his Council, order- ing a suspension of all proceedings under said judgments, 1 Much more so than were the Directors of the West India Company, who on April 7, 1648, wrote to Stuyvesant : " Cornel is Melyn is well known to us, and we shall understand how to refute his complaint. It is to he regretted that people have become so intimate with such fellows, when they ought to have given a good example to others," — referring doubtless to his supporters in the States-General. MANDAMUS TO STUYVESANT 115 and summoning Stuyvesant to appear before them to justify his acts. Under the procedure of the Dutch law, such orders were required to be served by a messenger of the States-General, or by a marshal or notary ; but to avoid the inconvenience of this in the present case, a special order was made allowing the service on Stuyvesant to be made by any person whom Melyn and Kuyter might appoint. It was arranged that Melyn should return to New Amsterdam with the order of the States-General, while Kuyter should remain, to be prepared for any treachery or exertion of arbitrary power on the part of Director-General Stuyvesant. In order to further guard against such danger, Melyn also procured a letter of safety for himself, directed to Stuyvesant, from the Stadtholder of the United Provinces personally, — Wilham II., Prince of Orange, father of the great politician best known to us as William III., King of England. Armed with these documents, Melyn sailed in the winter of 1648-49, apparently landing at Boston, and thence travel- ling through New England to New Amsterdam. He was naturally exultant at his victory over the Director-General, and seems to have shown some lack of discretion, exhibiting his papers from the Netherlands in several places, and talking in rather a high strain. At New Haven he met one of his townsmen, Eghbert van Borsum, who afterwards made a de- position that Melyn had said " that the High and Mighty Lords, the States of the United Netherlands, were greatly surprised that the English had not forcibly dragged Director Stuyvesant out of the Fort, and hung him on the highest tree; also that he had brought Kieft to his grave and that he would bring Stuyvesant also there : " there was other talk, according to the informant, but he went away, " so that he might no longer listen to the prattle." Upon his arrival at New Amsterdam in March, 1649, Melyn took care to revenge himself upon the Director- General for the insults he had previously received from him by having as many of the citizens of New Amsterdam as he could get together present to witness the mortification of that 116 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE official when the order of the States-General was served upon him : he even attempted to lengthen out the torture of his arbitrary and crestfallen opponent by reading aloud to him the contents of the document, but this Stuyvesant prevented by angrily snatcliing the paper from him, — no doubt to the great delight of the crowd ; he, however, sullenly announced his intention of respecting the orders of the Prince of Orange and of the States-General. In the mean time, encouraged by the results of the applica- tion of Melyn and Kuyter to the States-General, the jurist Adriaen van der Donck, in conjunction with several other opponents of the administration at New Amsterdam, pre- pared in July, 1619, the historic document known as " The Remonstrance of New Netherland." This vigorous paper, attacking the whole policy of the West India Company in relation to its colony of New Netherland, was carried over to the Fatherland by a deputation including Van der Donck and Melyn. Their departure was hastened by the fact that the Director-General had quietly sent over the Secretary Van Tienhoven to represent him before the States-General. The Secretar}^ probably carried with him a letter from Stuyvesant to that body, bearing date Aug. 10, 1649, ostensibly for the pur- pose of acknowledging the receipt of their mandamus, but in reality filled with insinuations against Cornells Melyn. Two weeks after the departure of Van Tienhoven the deputation sailed, — probably by the next vessel, — and for the second time Melyn watched the house of his family near the East River shore fade away in the distance ; he left them behind him, to be subjected to various petty annoyances from the Director-General. In the summer of the year 1649, Melyn's son-in-law. Captain Loper, applied for permission to trade in the South or Delaware River, but although the Council wtis in favor of granting the application, Stuyvesant sullenly re- fused to do so, giving no other reason than that he had re- ceived express orders from his superiors " to keep an eye on Cornehs Melyn." "We wish," says Janneken, the wife of Cornells Melyn, in a letter to her husband, dated December DELAYS IN THE NETHERLANDS 117 17, 1649, " that God would be pleased to send the delegates back quickly, with business accomplished, for here matters continue so bad as to excite murmurs against Heaven." Matters, however, did not move quickly; the management and even the future existence of the West India Company itself were now in question before the States- General, and although that corporation had much declined from its former power, it had still sufficient resources to make a vigorous fight in its own behalf and in that of its officers. To the charges made by Van der Donck, Melyn, and others, it sent to the ^States-General on the 27th of January, 1650, an answer couched in bitter terms against the petitioners.* Following the practice adopted by the States-General, all matters relating in any way to the West India Company were referred, in the first instance, to a standing committee upon the affairs of that body, there sometimes to slumber a long while. Melyn seems to have become wearied of the delays, and on the 8th of February, 1650, he complains to the States-General that owing to the absence from New Amsterdam of the Secretary, and to the obstacles thrown in his way by the authorities at that place, he has been unable to obtain certain papers necessary for his suit ; and he prays that august body to take into consideration the fact that he " hath now groped such a length of time, since the year 1643, in this labyrinth, without any error or fault of his, for the advancement of the public interests." The records which are accessible fail to show the final re- sult of the appeal of Melyn and Kuyter to the States- General from Stuyvesant's arbitrary judgments, but whether these were finally overturned or not, no further molestation to those per- sons appears to have ever taken place by reason of them, and both Kuyter and Melyn were now anxious to return to New Netherland and to take advantage of the quiet now prevailing with the Indians, to restore their wasted plantations. 1 The malignant disposition of the officers of tlie West India Company towards Melyn, Knyter, and Van der Donck, — especially towards Melyn, — are shown in almost every letter sent by them to New Netherland about this time. 118 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE In his long sojourn at the Hague, Cornells Melyn had been frequently brought into contact with a person of some note in the government at that period. It has been already stated that the papers relating to the affairs of the West India Com- pany which were presented to the States-General were re- ferred in the first instance to a standing committee of that body. At the head of this committee was Henryk van der Capellen : this gentleman was a deputy to the States-General from the county of Zutphen, and was a member of the Dutch nobility, being Lord of Esselt and Hasselt, near the east shore of the Zuyder Zee. He is frequently spoken of in the docu- ments relating to New Netherland by his title of Baron van der Capellen tho Ryssel, and was a man of independent fortune.^ The Baron van der Capellen appears to have taken a lively interest in the affairs of Cornelis Melyn, and not only did he forward the interests of the latter in the reports of his com- mittee to the States-General, but he finally entered into an agreement with him for the improvement and development of his Staten Island manor, or rather patroonship, in which Van der Capellen purchased an interest. The associates now made active preparations for carrying on the work of improvement. Van der Capellen purchased, in the summer of 1650, a sliip called Nieuw Nederlandsche Fortuyn, — The Fortune of New Netherland, — which he designed to send over to his colony ; the vessel sailed for New Amsterdam in the fall or winter of that year, carrying a superintendent, carpenter, seven farmers, and a company of 1 In an interesting communication respecting the ancient Van der Capellen family, Mr. Arnold J. F. van Laer, of the manuscript department in the State Library at Albany and formerly of Utrecht in the Netherlands, observes : " This is one of our prominent historic families, having played an important part in the eighty years' war with Spain. They were originally from France, where they received, as early as the eleventh and twelfth centuries, favors from the court ; and the house, in which the title of baron has been used for centuries, is to this day closely allied with the oldest families in the country." Henryk van der Capellen, referred to in the text, is understood to have died in 1659, leaving no descendants; it is uncertain whether his Staten Island estate was surrendered to the West India Company, or whether it was confiscated by the English, in the hands of his collateral heirs in 1 664, as being the property of subjects of the Netherlands. STUYVESANT CONFISCATES "FORTUNE" 119 seventy persons in all, with their necessary equipment, for the colony. With them returned Cornells Melyn, who on the preceding July 1 had received from tlie States-General let- ters of protection against his inveterate enemy Stuyvesant.^ The ship " Fortune," forced by stress of weather, touched at the Rhode Island Colony, and thence pursued her voyage to New Amsterdam ; by this deviation from her course, she had, it was claimed, infringed upon some of the customs regula- tions; and the Director-General grasped with avidity the opportunity of revenging himself upon Cornells Melyn, whom 1 It may not be out of place here to give some account of the further progress of the proceedings before the States-General against Director- General Stuyvesant and the West India Company, in the investigation souglit for by Adriaen van der Donck and his associates in the " Remonstrance " of 1649. On the 9th of August, 1650, the committee of the States-General reported that the matters alleged ought to be inquired into, and that Cornelis van Tienhoven, Stuyvesaut's secre- tary and representative, then in the Netherlands, should be examined upon inter- rogatories. That wily individual, after having upon the 29th of November, 1650, delivered a scurrilous reply to the "Remonstrance," managed to evade an examination till the latter part of the winter of 1650-51, when it was found that he was preparing to return to New Amsterdam. Thereupon the States- General, on February 7, 1651, made an order that he should not leave the country till he had answered certain prepared interrogatories; and on March 14 a further order was served upon him and Jan Jansen Damen, his father-in-law, who had accompanied him from New Amsterdam as Stuyvesaut's private agent, to appear for examination before the legislative body. The parties concerned, well assured of the backing of the West India Company, coolly set at defiance the mandate of the States-General. Jan Damen, bearing with him a deed from the West India Company to himself, as agent for Petrus Stuyvesant, of "the company's great bouwery" (weU known for nearly two hundred years as the Stuyvesant Farm, on Manhattan Island), which deed bore date March 12, 1651, immediately sailed for New Amsterdam, as the secretary of the company calmly notified the States-General, on the 21st of that month. Much irritated, the States-General now ordered the Amsterdam Chamber of the West India Com- pany not to allow Van Tienhoven to leave Amsterdam, and to notify the skipper of their ship " Waterhont," by which he was preparing to depart, not to receive him till he had obtained their permit. This order was treated with the same contempt as the former one, and on May 5, Van Tienhoven set sail for New Amsterdam. The matter appears to have now been allowed to drop. That such disregard of the authority of the States-General was suffered, appears to have been partly "^owing to the dislike of the States-General to interfere in provincial matters, partly owing to the ill-defined limits of its authority, and partly owing to the inexpediency of exciting hostile feelings or dissensions in the then threatening state of affairs between the United Provinces and England. 120 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE he affected to consider as a concealed partner in the enter- prise. He proceeded in the most arbitrary manner ; the crew of the " Fortune " were arrested and thrown into prison, and the vessel was condemned and sold. Stuyvesant had, however, in this matter, attacked a person who was too influential to be assailed thus with impunity. The Baron van der Capellen immediately instituted proceedings before the States-General against the West India Company for the illegal seizure of his vessel ; he was awarded heavy damages, and the Company had to pay roundly for the privilege of maintaining their despotic servant in his ofl&ce at New Amsterdam. As for Melyn himself, we do not find that he actually came in person at this time into the clutches of Stuyvesant, and there is reason to believe that instead of coming up to the town on the incoming vessel, he landed at his " manor " upon Staten Island. The men of Melyn's colony, and those of his partner, Van der Capellen, must have made quite a consider- able force, and Stuyvesant does not appear to have considered it advisable to make any hostile incursion against him.^ His property in New Amsterdam, however, embracing what re- mained of his purchases of 1644, and extending along the river shore from near the present Broad Street to the City Tavern, at the head of the present Coenties Slip, was confis- cated by Stuyvesant's orders. A portion of it, adjoining the tavern, was added to the ground of that establishment, and the remainder was divided into four parcels extending from "the road," or the present Stone Street, to the river shore, and these were granted to various persons in September, 1651. Cornelis Melyn now continued to reside for several years upon his Staten Island estate, not venturing, according to statements made by some of his contemporaries, to set his foot in New Amsterdam. His neighbor and friend, Jochem Pieter- sen Kuyter, had made his peace with Stuyvesant, whom with two others he had admitted in 1651 into joint ownership with ^ Melyn is also stated to have kept, at this time, a large number of Indians — more than a hundred in fact — in his service. As these statements come from his enemies, however, they must be accepted with caution. IMPKISONMENT OF MELYN 121 himself in liis plantation on the Harlem flats, where he was now actively engaged in restoring his impaired fortunes ; but in 1654 he was murdered by the Indians at Harlem. Kuy- ter's widow soon married Willem Jansen, the farmer or super- intendent of the Harlem plantation, but during the Indian outbreak in the fall of 1655 she too was killed by the natives, Kuyter left no children, and his small house at the corner of Broad and Pearl streets stood for several years vacant and ownerless, a melancholy memorial of the Indian troubles. Finally, the crumbling away of the river-bank in front of it led to action by the magistrates, and a " curator " was ap- pointed, who, on January 12, 1658, sold the house at pubhc auction to Hendrick Jansen Vandervin. As for Cornells Melyn, we find that in the summer of 1655 he was a prisoner in New Amsterdam ; but of the cir- cumstances leading to this imprisonment, we have no informa- tion. On the 31st of August of that year, upon a petition of Melyn's wife, asking that her husband might be removed to a more convenient place, " on account of his sore leg," the Council made an order that she might be permitted to remove liim to a more convenient place, " in the City Hall, or else- where," on condition that he should furnish bail. At this very time, Director-General Stuyvesant was busy in fitting out the force with which, on the 5th of September of this year, he started against the Swedes on the Delaware ; and it is difficult to avoid the suspicion that he had availed himself of liis mihtary preparations for the purpose of getting his old adversary into his power. However this may be, Melyn must have soon returned to his colony upon Staten Island, for there, in the course of the Indian hostilities which followed the outbreak of September 15, 1655, at New Amsterdam, he and several members of his family were made captives by the Indians, and his plantation was again destroyed. This misfortune was the ruin of Melyn's prospects upon Staten Island, which was left by the natives, according to the report of Secretary Van Tienhoven, "without an inhabitant or a house." The Indians, upon 122 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE this occasion, seem, as a rule, to have treated their prisoners without much harshness, and soon delivered them up for a moderate ransom. No further particulars respecting the prosecution of Cor- nelis Melyn by the New Amsterdam authorities have come to our notice, but it is evident that he soon abandoned the colony. In the early part of 1657, he and his son Jacob, hav- ing repaired to New Haven, there took the oath of allegiance to the English government. He subsequently went again to the Netherlands, and there, in June, 1659, for the sum of 1500 guilders, he surrendered his patroonship of Staten Island to the West India Company. After the fall of Stuyvesant and the capitulation to the English in 1664, Jacob Melyn returned to New York, and resided there for a number of years. His father, Cornells Melyn, was still residing in New Haven in 1662, but the time of his death is uncertain. The remaining members of Cornells Melyn's family seem to have still resided at the house in the easterly half of the present Broad Street, which, in 1647, he had given to his daughter Cornelia: her first husband. Captain Jacob Loper, had died prior to 1653, and she married in that year Jacob Schellinger, a merchant of Amsterdam, who was carrying on business in New Netherland, and who, after the retirement of Cornells Melyn, became the mainstay of the family. Jan- netje, the wife of Melyn, and liis daughter Corneha and her husband were for several years engaged in frequent litiga- tions with Captain Adriaen Pos, the agent of Melyn's co- partner, the Baron van der Capellen, respecting the division of the Staten Island property, and the settlement of various conflicting claims in connection therewith ; but it does not appear that Cornells Melyn, for the space of nearly five years, again set foot in New Amsterdam, to encounter his old enemy, Director-General Stuyvesant, — " a tyrant, as we have now and then been accused by the ignorant," as he complacently remarks of himself. Melyn was certainly in New Amster- dam in 1661, however, no doubt protected by his English citizenship. THE MELYN HOUSE REMOVED 123 The Melyn house in Broad Street did not remain long in existence after its builder had quitted it. After the Indian troubles of 1655 had in some measure subsided, it was de- cided to open up and to regulate several streets, in order to afford accommodation to the increasing number of those who desired to build in the town. One of the changes proposed in the early part of 1656 was to widen and deepen " The Ditch," so as to form a canal navigable for small boats, with a sufficient roadway on each side of it ; this, when completed by sheathing the sides of the canal with planks, formed the well-known Heere Graft, which covered the site of the pres- ent Broad Street, and which was a reminder, in a humble way, of the Heere Graft in Amsterdam. ^ To carry out this work, it became necessary to remove the house of the Melyn family, and in June, 1656, Jacob Schel- linger, Melyn's son-in-law, was notified not to proceed with the rest of his immediate neighbors in the construction of sheet-piling along their respective water-fronts, " as his house lies in the canal and on the road." A year or two afterwards it was demolished, and there was given by the burgomasters to the Melyn family, in partial compensation, a small lot of ground, only about eighteen feet square, at the southeast corner of Hoogh Straet (present Stone Street) and the Graft; this lot had been gained by the straightening of Hoogh Straet which took place about this time, the western end of that street being shifted some twenty or twenty-five feet north- wards, in order to make it connect more nearly with Brouwer 1 The Heere Graft (or modern Gracht) of Amsterdam, of which a view is given in this woric, is a canal, which with its bordering passageways is about one hun- dred and fifty English feet in breadth. Beginning and ending at or very near the Port, sometimes called, not very correctly, the River Y, it extends in a semi- elliptical curve around a considerable section of the city. A large portion of the Graft was constructed from about 1610 to 1615, and in the middle of the seventeenth century it formed the boundary of the city to the eastward, though a large extent of buildings had grown up to the west of it. The Heere Graft soon became one of the principal thoroughfares of Amsterdam, and (though containing no public buildings of much note), it soon came to be a favorite residence of the principal merchants, bankers, and others of the wealthier portion of the community. 124 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE Straet (or tlie present Stone Street, west of Broad) ; an inspection of tlie locality will show that the lines of these streets are not continuous at the present time. Here the Melyns built their second dwelling, a small brick house, and here some of them resided for many years. Nominally, the property belonged to the infant children of Captain Jacob Loper and of Cornelia Melyn,^ but it soon passed into the hands of other members of the family. On May 27, 1684, after Jannetje, the widow of Cornelis Melyn, had closed her eventful and troubled life, her eldest son Jacob received a conveyance of this property through the administrators of his mother's estate. He did not remain per- manently in New York, but was engaged in the business of a leather-dresser in Boston ; and in May, 1697, he sold the house for ^6360 to William Bickley, a merchant of the city, who had previously resided in it for some time as a tenant. It is a curious fact that this small plot of ground has retained its dimensions through the vicissitudes of nearly two centuries and a half, and is to-day occupied by a small and somewhat dingy brick building with a wealth of rusty iron fire-escapes ; it appears to have stoutly resisted absorption by the more imposing structui-e whose blank walls of j-ellow brick over- tower it on two sides. Just south of this house, along the present Broad Street, was a small space of ground which belonged to the Melyn family, and which became available for building purposes when the Heere Graft was opened and regulated, in 1657 or thereabouts. Here, at a date unknown, but doubtless within three or four years after the period last mentioned, a cottage was built which was afterwards occupied for many years by Isaac Melyn, a younger son of Cornelis. Isaac Melyn appears to have been engaged in shipping ventures as early as 1672 : he was at that time owner or master of 1 The record of baptisms iu the Dutch Church contains the names of two of the children of Captain Loper; namely, Jacobus, October 25, 1648, and Janne- ken, October 30, 1650. The daughter Janneken married, October 9, 1674, Joris Davidson of Albany : as to the son, see Appeudix II. to this volume. ViKw OF THE Southeast Corxeu of Broad and Stone Streets. Showing the sites of the later " Melyn House " and that of tlie poet Jacob Steendani. SIBOUT CLAESSEN 125 the ship " Expectation," and having a controversy with some freighters respecting damage occasioned by a leak, he received the permission of the Governor and Council to have the cargo unloaded and examined by arbitrators. The Broad Street premises were sold in 1722 by Joanna, the wife of Jonathan Dickinson of Elizabethtown, New Jersey, who was the only surviving child of Isaac Melyn, to William Ver- planck, a merchant of New York.^ At the time of our survey of New Amsterdam in 1655, a dwelling-house had been recently built on the south side of Hoogh Straet, immediately east of the spot upon which the later, or second, Melyn house was, within a year or two afterwards erected ; its site is at present covered by the northerly end of the large building which encloses two sides of the small Melyn plot, above described.^ The lot upon which this dwelling-house stood had been sold by Cornells Melyn, soon after his return from the Netherlands, in the early part of 1651, to Sibout Claessen, a carpenter by trade, from the ancient town of Hoorn, then a famous seaport upon the Zuyder Zee, some sixteen or eighteen miles north of Amsterdam. As Director Stuyvesant had, at this time, caused proceedings to be instituted against Melyn for an alleged infringement of the revenue laws, under which pro- ceedings the balance of his land along the East River shore was afterwards confiscated as above stated,^ he apparently refused to recognize the validity of Melyn's transfer to Claessen, and would not allow any deed of the property to be registered. Claessen, however, not only maintained pos- session of the premises, but thriftily endeavored to take ad- vantage of the irregularity, by refusing to pay IMelyn the price agreed upon. Stuyvesant's persecutions seem to have deterred Melyn for some years from prosecuting his demand for the purchase-money, and when he finally sued Claessen ^ For further details respecting tlie family of Cornelis Melj'n, see Appendix II. to this volume. ^ See ante, page 124. ^ gge a7ite, page 120. 126 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE before the Court of the Burgomasters, the cause languished along for several years, and was not terminated in Melyn's favor until 1661. The rear of this lot of Sibout Claessen, which extended to the shore, was encroached upon by the tides in violent storms ; and, for the purpose of preventing it from being washed away, Claessen, first among the owners upon the shore, constructed a sheet-piling of planks along the bank in the rear of his premises. This he had done prior to 1654, and upon his complaint the other owners, as far east as the present Coenties Alley, were ordered to carry out a similar work along their respective lots, the burgomasters engaging to construct the same protection to the shore in front of the Town House.^ 1 Sibout Claessen occupied the property on Hoogh Straet (Stone), above de- scribed, for many years. He had no children, but had married the widow of Aert Teunissen, a farmer at Hoboken who was killed by the Indians while on a trading excursion in the vicinity of Sandy Hook, in the year 1643; to her two daughters Wyntje, the wife of Simon Barentsen, and Susanna, wife of Rynier Willemsen, girls of about seventeen and fourteen years at the time of our survey, Claessen left his estate, at his death in 1680. In 1646 Claessen received a grant of about one hundred acres of land, " at the Hook of the Hellegaat called Hoorn's Hoek." This was a headland on the East River shore, near the foot of the pres- ent Eightj^-ninth Street, and the name is supposed to have been given to it by Claessen in remembrance of the locality of similar appellation, east of the entrance to the harbor of his native city of Hoorn. Claessen soon parted with the land upon the East Kiver, but the name was long familiar ; indeed, it appears upon a map published as late as 1875 or thereabouts, in the corrupted form of " Harris' Hook." CHAPTER XII JACOB STEENDAM, THE DUTCH POET, AND HIS HOUSE.— HIS POETICAL WORKS. - " DEN DISTEL VINK." — POEMS ON NEW NETHERLAND. — HIS LATTER YEARS AT BAT AVI A Der Christlichen Religion War er von hertzen zugethon, Dieselb zn fiirderu und zu ehren, Und rechten Gottsdienst zu vermehren. Das ist der schatz in dieser Welt, Der ubertrifft alls Gut und Gelt, Welchen der Rost nit fressen mag, Er bleibt biss an den Jiingsten Tag. " Ritter Theurdanck." BETWEEN the lot of Sibout Claessen and the Town House, upon the south side of the High Street, lay the confiscated land of Cornelis Melyn. This (after deducting a portion, which was added to the grounds of the Town House), had been divided into four parcels, which were sold to as many different individuals in September, 1651. Of these parcels, the one next to Claessen's lot was held at the time of our survey by Mattheus, or Matthew de Vos, a respectable notary of the town, who has been previously mentioned in these sketches.^ In the year 1655 it appears to have been still vacant and unimproved, ^ but the next year it was sold to Adolph Pietersen, a house carpenter who seems to have built upon it and occupied it as a residence for many years. ^ Of the remaining parcels of this series the ^ See ante, p. 12. - As, by the way, it happens to be at the present time (1900), the lot being boarded off from the street. * This person appears to liave been also occasionally employed — possibly for the convenience of the use of his carpenter's rule — in measuring off parcels 128 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE two nearest to the Town Hall were held in 1655, one by Sybrant Jansen, sometimes called Galma, — it is uncertain whether this was as yet built upon; the other, adjoining the enclosure of the Town House, was owned by Captain Adriaen Blommaert, skipper of the West India Company's ship " New Amsterdam ; " it was probably built upon as early as 1655, but the house seems to have stood upon what was really the rear of the lot, near the shore, so as to enjoy the immediate proximity of the Town House. As for the intervening parcel of land, or the one situated between the lot of Matthew de Vos upon the west and that of Sybrant Jansen upon the east, it possesses far more of interest and is in fact one of the historic sites of New Amsterdam. Here stood, without doubt, the original house of Burger Jorissen, the smith, erected certainly as early as 1641, and one of the first dwelling-houses, if not the very first, to be built in the village of New Amsterdam, east of the present Broad Street. Sold to Cornells Melyn in 1644, as already stated, ^ it was granted in 1651 as a part of his con- fiscated estate to Cornells van Tienhoven, the favored Secre- tary under Director-General Stuyvesant; and upon the 12th of October, 1654, it was purchased from Van Tienhoven by Doctor Jacob Varrevanger for Jacob Steendam, the Dutch poet, who resided here at the time of our survey. The passer-by in Stone Street, between Broad Street and Hanover Square, will, if he have sufficient leisure to look about him, be quite sure to have his attention directed to a two story and basement brick dwelling-house standing oddly in the midst of the dull warehouses of that locality. For a New York building, the house is ancient, — that is to say, it was probably erected in the first or second decade of the nineteenth century. Time has dealt hardly with the edifice of land for individuals. In this connection he executed, in 1664, immediately after the surrender to the English, "a survey "of a small parcel of land for Burger Jorissen, and in tliis occurs perhaps the first use of the new name of the town which can he traced to private citizens. Pietersea's phonetic spelling of the name was " Nu larck." 1 See ante, pp. 104, 105. STEENDAM'S HOUSE IN STONE STREET 129 in some respects ; its brown-stone doorsteps and window-sills are crumbling away, and its iron railings are deeply bitten with rust. The lower portion of the building seems to be devoted to certain mechanical trades, but the second story still displays its fringed window-shades and linen-covered parlor furniture, as it may have done three quarters of a century ago.^ It is no very violent supposition that this old house. No. 26 Stone Street, may be the immediate successor of the original house of Burger Jorissen, as afterwards held by Cornells Melyn and the Secretary Van Tienhoven. Upon the Justus Danckers view of New Amsterdam, the period of which cannot vary much from the year 1650, this build- ing appears to be clearly shown, and its position being an isolated one, the representation is likely to approach accu- racy, at any rate in its essential details. The house thus depicted is a modest-looking structure of a story and a half in height; its gable end fronts the road, but it has a door- way towards the south, looking in the direction of the City Tavern and of the river, the intervening space being as yet unoccupied by any buildings. At the "stoep" before this doorway a slight play of the imagination will suffice to place us: the elevated railway and the warehouses on Pearl Street and thence to the river have all disappeared, and in their place the waves ripple upon a shingly beach; at our front the garden extends a hundred feet or more to the bank overlooking the shore ; and a well with its rude sweep is seen among the vegetable beds and the currant bushes; to the left of us the Hoogh Straet stretches for a space, till it is gradually lost as it curves around the large house and grounds of Govert Loocker- mans;^ between these and the old City Tavern, or Town 1 After the completion of the present work, and in the latter part of 1901, or in the beginning of 1902, the old building spoken of in the text as occupying the site of Steendam's house Avas demolished. The vacant spot upon which it stood can be seen in the view of the site of the Melyn house at the corner of Broad and Stone streets, facing page 124 of this work, at the left-hand side of the print. 2 Situated on the present Hanover Square. 9 130 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE Hall, which is backed by a swelling knoll and some forest trees near the shore, a vista opens far up the dark blue waters of the East River; across the river (in which, not far from the shore, a few New England coasters and one or two of the high-sterned sea ships of the West India Company are lying at anchor), 1 the last rays of a summer sun gild the forests on the hills of Long Island ; and at our side, in a halo of the smoke of his evening pipe, is the patient, thoughtful, firm, but somewhat careworn face of Jacob Steendam, long-time servant of the West India Company, the first poet of New Netherland, and — if we leave out of view Welde and Mather's crude metrical version of the Psalms, published in New England in 1640, and Mrs. Anne Bradstreet's abstractions, published there at about the same period — in all probability the earliest poet of North America. ^ Jacob Steendam's life had been one of hardship and of adventure. Like Catullus, he found his haven — " Multas per gentes, et multa per aquora vectits,^' and it was this wandering life that called forth the lines, — *• O Steendam ! die door zoo veel zeen, Een reex van vijftien ronde jaeren U aen de Maatschappij verbint," — Thou, Steendam, who o'er many a sea, In service of the Company, While fifteen years around have rolled, etc., addressed to him by his friend, the Dutch poet, Pieter Verhoek. 1 In Burger Jorissen's day, in 1641, a drunken gunner, upon one of the vessels anchored near the shore, did considerable damage to this house, by the discharge of a shotted cannon in firing a salute. 2 George Sandys, while treasurer of the Colony of Virginia in its early days, is said to have occupied a portion of his time in preparing his translation of Ovid. As his stay in the colony was but a limited one, however, and as his works con- tain nothing relating to America, it is difficult to see why he should be called an American poet. As for the Rev. William Morrell, who resided for a very short time in the Plymouth Colony soon after its foundation, his verses published after his return to England, about the year 1625, in the pedantic Latin of his day, and which he called " Nova Anglia," are to be looked upon more as a liter- ary curiosity than anything else. ' i '""^ ' 3^- -^z*" '^"^ - '^'■^'^■Jf ^-^""'' uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuimuinMiuiuju(iiiuuuuuuuuiJUuauauuuuuuuuuuiiuiiini'jL'i'"i'iri;''''!'T'TPr'''.'n"'T"r"'vi'')i' l!|liltlllllKllfIM:IIIMtilM!iil'iiil '■■■ Jacob Stp:exdam — The Koomax roKTRAix. From a print in the Lenox Library, New York. ENKHUYSEN 131 According to the best information accessible, Steendam was born about 1616 in the city of Enkhuysen. This old town, in the extreme northeastern part of the province of Holland, and at the entrance to the Zuyder Zee, though now much decayed, was in Jacob Steendam's time in high prosperity. Its streets of substantial stone houses were filled with a busy throng of ship-builders, pilots, seamen, the fishermen of several hundred herring smacks then owned in the city, and the numerous artisans and tradesmen supplying the wants of this maritime population. The little city, too, was proud of its historic and scientific renown; in 1572 it was the first town in North Holland to raise the standard of liberty against the oppression of Spain, and its citizens had fought valiantly in the Dutch fleets and armies; the ships built here found their way to all parts of the globe ; one of them, "The Maid of Enkhuysen," was in the New Amster- dam trade ; the spirit of geographical research and of explo- ration became active, and Enkhuysen boasted of several renowned geographers and naturalists. The city lay in the midst of a world of waters, extending, as far as the eye could reach, to the north, east, and south ; only northwards, across the wide mouth of the Zuyder Zee, the houses and steeples of the old Frisian city of Staveren appeared to rise out of the sea: — *' Am fernen Horizonte Erscheint, wie ein Nebelbild, Die Stadt, niit ihreu Tiirmen In Abeuddammrung gehiillt ; " and far to the east, the light upon the island of Urck shone dimly through the misty nights upon the Zuyder Zee. To a mind like that of the young Jacob Steendam, there must have come many romantic visions, as the Amsterdam ships passed daily by Enkhuysen on their way to and from many strange lands, while now and then Dutch men-of-war or privateers sailed by with their Spanish or Portuguese prizes. The love of adventure was strong within him, and 132 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE at an early age he went to Amsterdam, where he soon entered the service of the West India Company. ^ But little is known respecting the position he occupied under that corporation, nor of his particular travels; when about twenty -five years of age, however, he was sent, in the inter- ests of the Company, to the coast of Guinea, and was present at the taking of Fort Axen or Axem from the Portuguese, in 1642,2 after which his duties detained him upon the Afri- can coast till the year 1649, when he appears to have returned to Amsterdam. 2 At least as early as 1636, when not more than twenty years of age, Steendam had written verses, and about 1649-50 he published a collection of them, called "Den Distelvink," — "The Thistle-finch," — which has now be- come exceedingly rare. This is a little volume of lyrical pieces, chiefly love songs, poems descriptive of his own perso- nal experiences and spiritual and devotional verses marked by a deeply religious feeling which was characteristic of the man, and which was well alluded to by the Dutch author, Johan Nieuwhoff, in his eulogistic lines upon Steendam : — " De gaaven van zyn Geest, in maatzang uitgeleezen, Verstrecken Godts gemeent een Harp die d'ooren streeld Met Davids Hemel-taal. Wie kan zijn kunst vollooven? Des Heeren Lofgezaag gaat alle Loff te boven." 1 " Amsterdam, Waar dat ik jeugdig kwam. Van u ik lest mijn af-scheijd nam," etc. 2 " Wy hebben kort daar na (met seven kloeke-Schepen), Den Spek een Fort ontmand ; dat wy met moet angrepen ; Waar op ik ban geleyd self in het cog van Mars," etc. ' In a poetical epistle, dated at Fort Axem in Guinea, 7 Aug., 1642, to "the very bright young daughter and poetess Aafje Cornells, at Enchuysen," Steen- dam gives several of the details of his journey to Africa. He sailed out of the Texel on the 11th of October, 1641, with a fleet of twenty-seven sail, bound to various quarters of the globe, and which narrowly escaped destruction in a severe storm which overtook them on the 17th of October, off the Isle of Wight. On December 19, he arrived at the Castle of Delmijn in Guinea- THE POEMS OF STEENDAM 133 His spirit's gifts divine, set forth in flowing song, Unto God's people give a harp which charms the ear With David's heav'uly theme. His art, what song may praise? The hymn of praise to God transcendeth all our lays. Many of the poems of Steendara are signed with the whimsi- cal pseudonym "Noch Vaster," — "still firmer," — which he seems to have adopted from some fancied appositeness to his own name, Steendam signifying "stone dam." His familiarity with nautical affairs gives a flavor of the sea to many of the verses of Jacob Steendam. In some of them, which are written with a vigor calling to mind the sea-verses of Campbell, one can almost hear the salt breeze whistling through the cordage of the West India Company's fleet as it sails southwards : — " Ye ploughers of the ocean And harrowers of the sea ! The ship Deventer goes before, And with the Koe sail we. Atid the Swan and Hind we see. To the Guinea coast of Africa we hie, To the golden Moorish land, Wherein God's mighty hand Hath planted our dominion far and nigh." ^ Always, whether upon the sea or the land, the poet finds some subject of moral reflection. In the "eyndelose wech," the endless wake of the ship as she sails through smooth waters, he sees the swift flowing away of an aimless human life; in the image of the anchor, he sees the right use of Time. So, too, hear " The Thistlefinch " singing to the newly married couple : — 1 " Gij ploegers van den Oceaan En Eggers in de Zee. 't Schip Deventer wil voor ons gaan, Wij volgen met de Ree, De Swaan en Hinde mee; Ons Oog-wit is Guine » In Africa. Het goud rijk Moren-land, Daar God krachtig heeft geplant Onsen Handel, voor en na." 134 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE " A ship with sturdy timbers No haven long may stay, Tho' Neptmie's foaming billows Are roaring on her way ; But yet she hastens out, Her tarry tackle shining: Along her brown hull's sides A thousand links arc twining. " ' T is patience shows the helmsman The goal for which he steers, Tho' Thetis frowns upon him, And Triton's rage he hears ; Who with his dolphins all The very clouds is scaling ; The surly Sun-God too His face and rays is veiling. " Now read my hidden meaning : Ye and the ship are one ; The waning of affection, The storm and reefs to shun. A helmsman is provided, And youth's bright dreams to cherish ; The world's ways are the Sea, — The Gulf where many perish." ^ 1 " Een schip seer vrel getimmerd Houd gecn havens-stee ; Schoon dat Neptunus schimmerd, Ein'schend op de Ree, Nochtans het ijld sich iiyt Met syn bepekte takels ; En bruyn geverfde huyd, Gehecht met duysend scliakels. " Geduld vertoond den Stuurmaii 't Wit daar hy opdoeld A\ siet hem Thetis suur an, En of Triton woeld ; Die met syn Dollephijn Tot an de Wolken steygerd Daar Delius hem sijn Gesicht en Stralen weygerd. " Let nu eens op mijn Mening: Gij dan sijt het schip; d' Onheylen, echts-verkl^ning Is 't onweer en klip; Den Stuurman is u geeft En jeugds genegendheden De Zee (die m^nig vreest) Vertoond des Werelds zeden." "DEN DISTELVINK" 135 In one sense, Steendam's name and his favorite poetical pseudonym are particularly appropriate : there is one quality conspicuous all through his writings, and it is that of stead- fastness. Some of his imagery is not of the most delicate description, and his phrases are occasionally prolix and in- volved ; but the earnestness of the man so illuminates his work that one would be no more disposed seriously to criti- cise his verses than those of Wordsworth or of Whittier. He seems from the very beginning to have kept steadily in view a plan of progression from higher to higher aims, — a design which he never lost sight of, and which he has set forth quaintly in the opening lines of "Den Distelvink." " Here by the Amstel's stream the Thistlefinch is singing, As though 't were but to-day he from the nest were winging. See how the callow bird, with artlessness elate, Already seeks to pair and blythely calls his mate. 'T is sure that as he chirps so erst his elders sung. For as the old birds sing, so cliirp and pipe the young. Though with the nightingale's his song may not compare. He speaks in his own tongue and sings to his own ak : For tender little birds have feeble bills, I trow : But yet, O loving youths, another tune ye '11 know, If ye can only wait until his pinions grow. And upwards to the clouds he '11 soar from earth below." * Seven years spent under the tropical sun of Africa had added more than the years might indicate to the cares of Jacob Steendam and to his sense of the seriousness of life, when, in 1649, the long wished-for opportunity arrived for a 1 "Hier singt den Distelvink omtrent des Amstels Stromen, AI3 of hy nyt den dop eerst heden was gekomen; Siet doch het naakte Dier beloont syn biydeu aart, Het soekt en smeekt syn helf t, en wenscht te zijn gepaart ; 't Is seker so het pijpt ook eerst sijn ouders songen Want so den oiiden singt so pijpen ook de jongen. Schoon dat het niet en queelt gelijk den Nachtegaal, Het singt op sijn manier en spreekt sijn ej'gen taal. Want sachte vogeltjes die hebben weeke nebben; Ghy suit (0 foete jeucht) een ander deuntje hebben Indien gij wachten kunt, tot dat het veeren krygt En van de aerd om hooch tot door de wolken stijgt." 136 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE return to the Netherlands. His health had suffered in the pestilential climate of the countr}-, — "this poisonous Africa," as he calls it;^ and he tells in his verses of the confused visions of "the World, the Flesh, and the Devil," which crowded upon him in the delirious hours of his fevers. Then, too, he suffered in one of the strongest attachments of his devoted nature, in the breaking up of the companionship between himself and his close friend Johannes FouUon, one of the principal mercantile agents in Africa of the West India Company, — a young man of about the poet's age, who returned to Holland in 1G45. Many of Steendam's verses are addressed to this friend. Jacob Steendam seems to have reached the Netherlands in the early part of the year 1649, for on or about the 21st of July of that year the first part of " Den Distelvink " was published at Amsterdam, and on the 20th of November of the same year, the second part of the work was published at the same place, while the third and concluding portion appeared on the 6th of Jul}^ 1650. Prior to this latter date Steendam seems to have been married to Sara de Rosschou, whose praises he had sung in some of the verses of the last part of "Den Distelvink." About the year 1652, Steendam arrived at New Amster- dam, but whether he was still in the employment of the West India Company is not known. In July, 1653, he purchased a small house and lot in Pearl Street directly under the walls of the fort, and here he appears to have resided for a short time, till he acquired, in the following year, the house upon Hoogh Straet, above described, which was his residence at the period of our survey. Besides the above parcels of land in New Amsterdam, Steendam owned for a time a house and garden upon the east side of Broad- way, about midway between the present Beaver Street and 1 " Hy sal n (beliouden) brengen Uy t dit gif tig Africa ; Hy sal u de tijd verlengen, Tot in 't oud-Batavia," etc. STEENDAM IN NEW AMSTERDAM 137 Exchange Place, and a garden spot, or piece of vacant ground, of about half an acre in extent, on the north side of the then recently laid out Prinse Straet (now forming an easterly extension of Beaver Street), between the present Broad and William streets. As to Steendam's occupation while in New Amsterdam, but little is known. A bill for a dozen cushions, supplied by him to the burgomasters of the town for their use in the Town Hall, has been taken as an evidence that he was in possession of the trade of an upholsterer, but this is a mere conjecture, and he calls himself indeed upon several occasions, a "trader." Like most of the citizens of New Amsterdam who possessed some capital, however, he was interested in farming operations, and soon after his arrival he became the proprietor of a plantation at Amersfoort upon Long Island, and of a tract of about thirty acres, doubtless woodland, upon the shore of the Mespat Kill, at present known as Newtown Creek. He seems to have been a prosperous man, and several mortgages to him appear upon the records during his sojourn in New Netherland. Steendam remained about eight years in New Amsterdam, returning to the Netherlands in the latter part of the year 1660, as nearly as can be ascertained. He was deeply interested in the affairs of the Colony, and he deplored the neglected state into which it had been suffered to fall, between the indifference of the Dutch government on the one hand, and the failing circumstances of the West India Company on the other. It was with a view to excite public attention in the Netherlands to this condition of things that in 1659 Steendam sent there his first poem on the affairs of the Colony; this was called "The Complaint of New Am- sterdam to her Mother." After his return to Amsterdam, and about the year 1661, he published a poem of some length, entitled " The Praise of New Netherland, " dedicated to Cornells van Ruyven, then Secretary of the Colony, and this was followed in 1662, or soon thereafter, by a third poem, bearing the odd appellation of " Prikkel-Versen " (which has 138 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE been well rendered as " Spurring Verses "), and designed for the purpose of urging on a proposed attempt by the city of Amsterdam to plant a colony on the Delaware River, upon land granted for that purpose by the West India Company. At the period of Jacob Steendam's residence in New Amsterdam, the creative powers of nature were still in full operation in the immediate vicinity of the settlement. A walk of ten minutes from his home brought him to rural solitudes along the Maagde Pact je, or Maiden Lane ; a walk of less than an hour brought him to the primeval forest beyond Director Stuyvesant's bouwery. The sight of the bountiful gifts of nature, open to all, seems to have inspired him with a wonderful confidence in the future of the land. The prospect was undisturbed by the troublesome questions of a vast and increasing proletarian population ; of boundless municipal and private extravagance; of an army of non-tax- paying professional politicians, drawing their support from the tax-paying classes; of enormous taxes, draining the life- blood from trade and commerce ; and of vice too great for the police power adequately to cope with. All these problems were far distant; the virtues and vices of the community were those of an infant state of society. Many of the people were poor, but those who were able and willing to labor could easily supply their simple wants, even though it were " Met suppaan en Harte vleysch," — with suppaan and venison ; and all might reasonably expect materially to better their condition. Steendam exulted in the land and in its capabilities; at the edges of the uplands, from under the roots of the beeches and alders, a thousand springs of the purest water gushed forth; around the settlement lay, in all directions, the virgin soil, "red, white, blue, and black," possessing the most varied qualities; everywhere he saw the "kills" rolling their full streams through the woods; all these it was his delight to extol in his verse. He had perhaps looked from the STEENDAM'S LOVE OF NATURE 139 Bergen Heights upon the waving sea of reeds extending to tlie forest-chid hills far away to the west ; upon the beach at Corlaer's Hoek, he had wandered among the great boulders of gneiss and sandstone and trap, the detritus of the glacial age ; from his house upon the East River shore he had often watched the great forests of Long Island beyond the sand bluffs ; these, too, all appeared in his song. He was a close observer of the exuberant animal and vegetable life around him : from his own door he had seen the stately flight of the eagle, or the poising of the hawk over the East River, and the tumbling of the porpoises in the bay ; in sheltered coves along the shores of "the Company's Bouwerys " and their meadows, the wild ducks and geese swam in their seasons; at the edges of the swamps along "Bestevaars Killetje," back of Director Van Twiller's tobacco fields, and not far per- haps from where Washington Square now is, the wild tur- keys fed ; quail started up before him in the pastures along the Bouwery Lane; in the thickets upon the Sand Hills the partridge whirred past him ; and as he rambled along the banks of the "Great Kill," the otter slid into the water before him; the raccoon and fox, the marten and the mink, the rabbits, and the flying-squirrels, "leaping through the air," — he tells of them all. Everywhere, too, in the autumn woods, he saw the nut trees, with the ground beneath them covered with their ungathered stores ; in the common pasture fields and in the newly cleared lands, in early summer, he admired the profu- sion of the strawberries, " which in proud scarlet shine ; " in hedgerows and waste spots, — likely enough along Secretary Van Tienhoven's lane, where narrow and dingy Ann Street now is, — he had gathered the bark and the tender shoots of the medicinal sassafras in early spring, or the wild cherries in late summer; in the wet borders by Maagde Paetje, mint and catnip, tansy and the bee-haunted thyme grew thickly; and the gardens of the colonists were filled with kitchen vegetables without limit. To Steendam's enthusiastic mind, the whole country was a garden, and he sings : — 140 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE " Siet, mijn tuyn leyd an twee Stromen Die van 't Oost, en 't Noorden komen, En haar storten in de Zee, Visch-rijk boven alien Mee." North and east two streams supplying, 'Twixt the two my garden lying ; Here they pour into the sea, Rich with fish, beyond degree. The teeming life of the waters, in fact, excites his special admiration, and he tells of the sliad and the striped bass, of the sea bass and the blackfish, of the crabs, lobsters, mussels, and oysters, — " So large that one, in size, exceedeth three Of those of Europe." Even the humble sunfish and perch of the Kolck pond are not forgotten. In his close observation of nature (more than in his facility of expression), Steendam has something of kin to Robert Burns, and he could have well appreciated the Scotchman when he sings : — " Ev'n winter bleak has charms for me When winds rave thro' the naked tree ; Or frosts on hills of Ochiltree Are hoary gray ; Or blinding drifts wild-furious flee, Dark'ning the day. " O Nature ! a' thy shows an' forms To feeling, pensive hearts hae charms 1 Whether the simmer kindly warms Wi' life an' light, Or winter howls, in gusty storms, The lang, dark night ! " Upon such a night — perhaps in the year of grace 1655 — Jacob Steendam sits in his armchair, meditatively contem- plating a blazing hickory log which lies in the ample fire- place of his house on Hoogh Straet : — " 't is noten-hout dat niemand heeft geplant,' — STEENDAM RETURNS TO PIOLLAND 141 nut-wood, planted by no human hand! Outside, the wind whistles about the exposed dwelling; the snow drives through the dark street, where the shuttered windows give no light; and he hears the waves of the East River dash- ing with freezing spray upon the stones of the beach below the piling back of his house; but within doors the blaze of the odoriferous wood grows brighter and hotter, and he exclaims : — " Wiens heete vlam geen voclit noch koude wijkt, Wieiis geur, en reuk, (vol angenaamheyt), lijkt Na Eden's velden." Whose genial flame yields to no damp nor cold, Whose odors fragrant are as those of old, In fields of Eden. The house upon Hoogh Straet was sold by Steendam in September, 1G5G, to Jan Cornelissen van Hoorn, the ancestor of the Van Home family of the Colony. The poet remained several years longer in New Netherland, however, and for a time, about the year 1657, he is said to be " at present resid- ing in New Haven," but as to the business which took him to that place, and as to the length of his sojourn there, we have no information ; but in the summer of 1660 we find him preparing to return with his family to Amsterdam. He now entered into the employment of the Dutch East India Com- pany, and in 1666 he sailed from Amsterdam for Batavia on the island of Java, the emporium of the Dutch colonies in the eastern seas, he having received the appointment of Zie- kentrooster, or visitor and consoler of the sick at that place, — an inferior ministerial office in the church. At Batavia, Steendam was chosen, in 1668, governor of the Orphans' House in that city, and he held that office for several years, still exercising occasionally his poetical gifts, for he pub- lished here another collection of lyrical pieces, called " Zeede Zangen voor de Batavische Jonkheit," — "Moral Songs for the Batavian Youth." Here, then, Jacob Steendam ended his days amid strange 142 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE and unfamiliar scenes. As he walked down the broad Heere Straet of that rising city, he could catch glimpses, on either hand, of canals with their bordering roadways, as he had often seen them at Amsterdam or at Rotterdam, but where the low-roofed Dutch houses which lined them were oddly' overtopped by tufted palm-trees, and the canals themselves bore uncouth names, such as the Lion's Graft, the Tiger's Graft, or the Crocodile's Graft. Lithe crowded market-place he saw, besides the Dutch and Portuguese from Europe, men of the varied races of southeastern Asia, — Chinese and Malays, Siamese and Cambodians, natives of Sumatra and of the Spice Islands, with the fat, sleepy-looking Javanese; occasionally perhaps a military detachment would pass him, on its way to some service or another in the island, where the Dutch soldiers, with their heavy muskets and with their field artillery, contrasted strangely with the long-haired, turbaned Amboynese auxiliaries, in the pay of the East India Company, bearing murderous-looking scimitars and oblong shields almost as huge as those which Jacob Steen- dam's ancestors had carried, when under the leadership of Civilis they had slaughtered the Roman legions sixteen centuries before. Every day, when the morning breeze sprang up, a crowd of vessels sailed into the port, as they had thronged by Enkhuysen with a favoring wind in Steendam's younger days; but here the Dutch ships were mingled with Chinese junks, and with all the extraordinary forms of naval archi- tecture made use of by the islanders. Looking landwards from the city walls, the broad plantations of rice and of sugar-cane which stretched away towards the dark mountains of Java, lay in a quivering haze in that climate where " With fearful power the noonday reigns, And the pahn-trees yield no shade." The slow flow of the Jacatara River through the heart of the city may have served to recall to Steendam memories of the Amstel and of Amsterdam; but there was little to bring to STEENDAM'S FAMILY 143 his mind his house upon the East River shore at New Amsterdam, and that New Netherland of which he had sung : — " Dit is het Land daar Melk en Hoenig vloeyd ; Dit is 't geweest daar 't Kruyd, (als Dist'len) groeyd ; Dit is de Plaats daar Arous-Roede bloeyd ; Dit is liet Eden." This is the land where milk and honey flow ; Where wholesome herbs freely as thistles grow ; The land where Aaron's Rod its buds doth show ; A very Eden ! Jacob Steendam appears to have died at Batavia in 1671, or soon thereafter, when his wife was continued in the super- vision of the Orphans' House at that place. Upon the death of the latter in 1673, her daughter Vredegond succeeded to the same position, though very young. This daughter of Steendam, who was baptized in the Dutch Church at New Amsterdam, April 4, 1655, was in all probability born in the house upon Hoogh Straet, above described. Besides her, Steendam had two other children baptized in the Dutch Church during his sojourn at New Amsterdam; namely, Samuel, on November 18, 1657, and Jacob, on December 4, 1658; whether the sons reached maturity is not known. ^ 1 Most of the scanty particulars we have lespectiug the life of Steendam have heen gathered by Mr. Henry C. Murphy, and are given in his valuable mono- graph on the anthology of New Netherland. CHAPTER XIII JACOB VAN COUWENHOVEN AND HIS BREWERY.— PRINSE STRAET, AND ''THE GARDENS."— SLYCK STEEGH, OR MILL LANE. — THE BARK MILL. — DOMINIE MICHAELIS AND THE FIRST DUTCH CHURCH. — EVERT DUYCKINK " Holland ! Holland ! See, we sever Like a fleet, each wendiiig ever Towards his fore-appointed place. Farewell, farewell ! wiiate'er betide us This we know, that God will guide us, Whom we pray'd to be beside us ; Praised be His grace ! Amsterdam, Where in my youth I came, From you my last departure I must tell ; And all my friends together, fare ye well, I leave you, in God's name ! " Translated from Steendam's " Den Distelvink." NEARLY opposite the house of Jacob Steendam, upon Hoogh Straet, and occupying a part of the site of the building which stands upon the northeast corner of the present Broad and Stone streets, but fronting upon the latter street, stood at the time of our survey a house belonging to Jacob Wolfertsen van Couwenhoven. This man, with his two brothers, Peter and Gerrit, were the sons of WoKert Gerrit- sen, of Amersf oort, a town of considerable size, about twenty- five miles southeast of Amsterdam, and a few miles south of the Zuyder Zee. That town had suffered grievously in 1629 from its occupation by an Austro-Spanish army, in the drag- ging war which Spain was vindictively carrying on against the United Provinces, and there is strong probability that it was this misfortune that led Wolfert Gerritsen and his sons to seek JACOB VAN COUWENHOVEN 145 a home in New Netherland in the following year. The sons themselves at this time would seem to have been men of mature years; at any rate, Jacob van Couwenhoven was familiarly known about the town, in 1655, as " old Jacob." The father, for several years prior to 1639, hired one of the newly cleared farms of the West India Company,^ being the one commonly known as " Bouwery No. 6," the farmhouse of which stood upon the east side of the present Chatham Square, its land lying generally between the present Division Street and the river shore. The brothers appear to have been men endowed with gen- erous and kindly dispositions ; and in 1646, after the death of their father, and of their brother Gerrit, when they came to divide their slender patrimony, they allowed, by an agreement which is still extant, to Jan, one of the young children of their deceased brother, 100 guilders more than to the others, "because he has not as good health as the others, and is weak in his limbs, and to all appearance will not be a stout man." Amersfoort, the native town of the Van Couwenhoven brothers, with its great church spire towering high above a picturesque landscape of hill and dale, — quite different from the general character of the scenery of the Netherlands, — • was, in the seventeenth century, the seat of an active transit trade of tobacco, beer, malt grains, etc., between the Nether- lands and Germany ; barges from Amsterdam and from all the ports of the Zuyder Zee saiHng up the small river Eem to the town, whence a short land carriage brought their freight to the banks of the Rhine. Many of the inhabitants of Amersfoort were familiar with the brewer's trade, and among these was Jacob van Couwenhoven. He appears to have had the design, from an early day, of establishing a brewery in New Amsterdam, ^ His first employment was at Rensselaerswyck, near Albany.where f or a time he was superintendent of farms for the patroon Van Rensselaer. After coming to New Amsterdam, he was one of the purchasers, in 1636, of a tract of land from the Indians at what is now known as Flatlands, south of Brooklyn, but to which he gave the name of New Amersfoort. His lands here, after his death, passed to his sons, and the descendants of his son, Gerrit, under the name of Couwen- hoven, or Kouwenhoven, are still numerous upon the western end of Long Island. 10 146 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE and for this purpose, as early as 1645, he had obtained from Director-General Kieft, the grant of " a lot for a dwelling- house, brewery, and garden, lying behind the public inn." This was a plot of ground of about sixty-five English feet front, by more than one hundred feet in depth, situated also on Hoogh (Stone) Straet, and a couple of hundred feet east of the parcel we are more particularly describing. Here, Jacob van Couwenhoven commenced operations by building for himself a substantial stone dwelling-house ; by the time this was completed, he found himself so heavily in debt, — the unusual sum, for those days, of about 3,500 guilders, or $1,400 on his house alone, — that his brewery project was deferred, perforce, for a number of years. Van Couwen- hoven was, in fact, an inveterate speculator, and wherever any piece of property was offered for sale at what he thought was a " bargain," such as the old church building near the shore, or the old horse mill property upon Slyck Steegh (now South William Street) back of his house, he stood ready to buy it, without the least regard to his ability to pay for it. It was perhaps in this way that he had become, prior to 1654, possessed of the plot of ground we are more particularly describing, at the corner of " the Ditch " and of Hoogh Straet : that piece of land had been originally granted to one Antony Jansen, but had been abandoned by him and allowed to become, as the records express it, " a stinking pool," and in 1646 it had been regranted to the prominent shipping merchant, Govert Loockermans, who was a brother-in-law of Jacob van Couwenhoven, their wives being sisters. Hester Jansen, the wife of Jacob van Couwenhoven, had died seem- ingly in the early part of the year 1655, and he, with his family of four or five young children, still occupied the stone house down Hoogh Straet at the time of our survey, while the plot at the corner of the present Broad Street, upon which a brick dwelhng-house had been built, probably either by Govert Loockermans or by Jacob van Couwenhoven himself, was at this time occupied by the mother of his deceased wife. Adjoining this latter house, upon the east, stood, in 1655, VAN COUWENHOVEN'S BREWERY 147 two small houses owned by Mighiel Paulussen, who followed the occupation of a carter. The westernmost of these was hired out to different tenants, and in the latter part of 1655 became the abode of Joseph d'Acosta, one of the Portuguese Jews, whose rough reception at New Amsterdam in the previ- ous year has been already alluded to ; ^ the easternmost of the two houses was occupied by Paulussen himself ; he was from Vraendoren, in the Netherlands, and had married, in 1640, Maria, daughter of Joris Rappalje, who with her elder sister Sara are supposed to have been almost the first children of European extraction who were born in the colony. ^ It was upon the site of these latter houses, adjoining his own plot, which lay to the west, that Jacob van Couwen- hoven about this time determined to erect his long-planned brewery. There was a good well upon the premises which was probably an object to him in his undertaking, and which possibly still e.dsts under the buildings at present covering the site. In the course of the next year, 1656, he had made arrangements with Paulussen for the acquisition of the ground and houses of the latter; the buildings were de- moHshed or removed, and here, upon the site of the present Nos. 27 and 29 Stone Street, Van Couwenhoven commenced the erection of his brewery, which was a substantial edifice of stone, and evidently of considerable size, for it is usually spoken of, in the records, as "the great stone brew-house." All this time he was greatly hampered by his debts : in Au- gust, 1656, one of his creditors, Pieter Jacobsen Marius, made an application to the burgomasters that Van Couwenhoven should be required to sell some of his property, and apply the proceeds to the liquidation of his debts ; " otherwise," the petitioner says, " he knows not when he shall obtain his own." Van Couwenhoven appeared and stated to the burgomasters that he had abeady placed in the hands of tlie Schout, or bailiff, his deed of the old church property upon the strand ^ See mite, page 85. ^ The claims of Jan Vinje to the houor of having heen the first white child born in New Netherland will be considered farther on. 148 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE (purchased by him only three or four weeks before), to be held as security. As Jacob was one of the oldest citizens, generally well esteemed, and prominent in the church (he had been, in 1647, one of the church-wardens, in conjunc- tion with Director-General Stuyvesant, and Jan Jansen Damen, specially chosen to complete the church edifice in the fort), the burgomasters were loath to adopt extreme measures ; he was therefore notified by the magistrates to sell his property at private sale, and satisfy his creditors within fourteen days, or in default thereof, the Schout would be ordered to sell the same at public auction. Under this spur, he sold the old church lot, on the 8th of September, 1656, to Isaac de Foreest, and in December of the same year he sold at public auction his stone house, a little farther down Hoogh Straet, to Nicholas de Meyer, after which he seems to have taken up his residence upon his lot, at the corner of the present Broad Street, adjoining his as yet unfinished brewery. He was still heavily embarrassed, however, but in the latter part of 1656, we find his friend, Isaac de Foreest, coming forward to assist him. De Foreest presented at that time a petition to the Director-General and Council, for permission to contract in advance with Jacob van Couwenhoven for all the beer the latter could brew in the space of a year, " so that such a well-situated brewery as that " (of Van Couwen- hoven), "may not be abandoned, but to the contrary may become the means to maintain decently that man with his family, while otherwise his ruin might be unavoidable." These various measures seem to have been of no more than temporary relief. In September, 1655, " old Jacob " had mar- ried Magdalentje Jacobse ; his first wife's children seem to have been possessed of some property which was in their father's hands and which was deemed by their other relatives to be in jeopardy; for upon January 3, 1657, Pieter van Couwenhoven his brotlier, and Govert Loockermans, the hus- band of his late wife's sister, make an application to the Council for the appointment of guardians for the children, alleging that Jacob " has been inclined to enter into second VAN COUWENHOVEN'S BREWERY 149 nuptials, and is grossly encumbered with several heavy debts, which he is daily increasing." Jacob van Couwenhoven treated with contempt, however, the demand of the guardians for an accounting : he could not keep track of his own affairs ; how then could they expect him to know anything about those of any one else. The guardians were forced to report to the Council that although they had " strained every nerve," they could get no account from Jacob of his situation : an order of Council for his arrest followed promptly, but, as nothing further appears, it is to be presumed that Van Couwenhoven patched up some kind of an account of his children's estate. The brewery was finished, probably by 1657, but the affairs of its proprietor were apparently hopelessly involved, and by the year 1663 Van Couwenhoven had surrendered his brew- ery and its contents to his creditors ; the latter appear to have permitted Jacob to operate the brewery for several years, but in December, 1670, some months after Jacob van Couwen- hoven's death, his executors conveyed the property to several individuals, — Oloff van Cortlandt, Johannes van Brugh, Cor- nells van Borsum, in right of Sara Kiersted, his wife, and Hen- drick Vandewater, who appear to have been a sort of syndicate of creditors. Upon the westerly side of the house and brewery of Jacob van Couwenhoven, a narrow and irregular passageway ran, in 1655, along the ditch occupying the middle of the present Broad Street; and the grants of land along it infringed largely — in some cases to the extent of twenty feet or more — upon what we now know as Broad Street.^ At the period mentioned, four houses had been built along the easterly side of this passageway : of these, it will be sufficient to indicate in a general way the sites and the owners' names, as none of the latter were of particular prominence. At the north ^ In 1670 the Court of Burgomasters made an order that the fence of Van Couwenhoven's property here " should be drawn back and set on the common line " of the street. 150 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE corner of the present South William Street stood the house of Adriaen Vincent, who in 1649 is spoken of as " late cadet in the company's service," and as having come from " Aecken," which is perhaps a village of that name, some six or seven English miles from the old city of Ghent. Vincent had ac- quired this plot of land and built here about 1646. About forty feet farther north was the house of Simon Felle, a Frenchman from Dieppe in Normandy who in 1652 had purchased a house and a small plot of ground from Adrieen Vincent : four years later he married Anneken Vincent of Amsterdam, a relative, either sister or daughter of Adriaen. Fifty feet more intervened between this house and that of Abram Rycken, one of the older colonists, and the ancestor of the Riker family of the present day ; he had built here as early as 1647. A similar interval brings us to the house of Jochem Beekman, a shoemaker, which stood near the corner of a narrow cross-road, later known as Prinse Straet, and which, somewhat widened, exists to day as an easterly exten- sion of Beaver Street ; Beekman had purchased a small plot here from Abram Rycken, and had built in or about 1652. As for the Prinse Straet, it and a line a few rods north of the present Beaver Street, west of Broad, formed the southerly limit of the West India Company's reserved parcel of pasture- ground, which has already been spoken of ^ as having been leased to Jan Jansen Damen in the spring of 1638 : upon the termination of that lease, 1644, the Director and Council de- termined to grant portions of the land in building plots, and for that purpose the narrow Prinse Straet was laid out along the southern bounds of the field. At the period of our sur- vey the street apparently contained but two houses : one was upon the north side, and about eighty-five feet east of the present Broad Street ; it had been built about the year 1652 by Albert Pietersen, from Hamburgh, a trumpeter in the service of the West India Company. The other house stood upon the south side of the street about fifty feet from Broad Street, and belonged to Lourens Petersen, who had found 1 See ante, page 9. THE TUYNEN OR "GARDENS" 151 his way to New Amsterdam from the seaport of Tonsberg at the mouth of the Christiania Fiord in Norway. The house is mentioned as standing here as early as 1647. Be- yond this point, the old pasture-field had been recently broken up into plots of about one-half acre each, which in 1654 had been granted to several of the magnates of the settlement, — to Nicasius de Sille, member of the Council, to Secretary Van Tienhoven, to Carel van Brugge, late commis- sary at Fort Orange, and to Dominie Samuel Drisius. These plots extended up to the present Wall Street, and were not as j'^et improved at the time of our survey : they were the tuy- nen or gardens ; and a few years afterwards, when the pres- ent Exchange Place was laid out through them, it was called by the Dutch, Tuyn Straet, and by the English subsequently, Garden Street. Back of the house and brewery of Jacob van Couwenhoven ran a narrow lane, not very agreeable to the eye, perhaps, in the seventeenth century, but of considerable interest at the present day, in the widened and somewhat extended form under which it is known as South William Street. It is of especial interest because it is one of the earliest and quite probably the very earhest of the Dutch thoroughfares re- maining as originally located. Its origin can be traced back clearly to the year 1625 or 1626, — to a period when there was as yet no occasion for a road along the East River shore, when Broad Street was a swamp and nothing more, — when Beaver and Marketfield, Stone and Bridge streets had not been thought of, and when the site of Broadway was covered with trees and bushes. When the first Dutch vessels arrived in 1625, with agri- cultural colonists for Manhattan Island and for its immediate vicinity, they brought with them over one hundred head of cattle, besides a considerable number of horses, sheep, and hogs. As the few inhabitants of the place, who for the pre- vious thirteen or fourteen years had been clustered about the log block-house under Hendrick Corstiaensen's command, 152 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE were mostly Indian traders, depending for their sustenance upon supplies from the neighboring Indians and from the Netherlands, they had not engaged in agriculture, and in all probability the island was still in an uncleared condition, almost up to the blockhouse itself, since the wood which the inhabitants needed for building purposes or for fuel would naturally, owing to the difliculties of land carriage, have been floated or brought by boat from points along the shores. There being no place in which the cattle of the new colonists could be securely kept upon Manhattan Island, we are in- formed that on their arrival they were at first landed upon Nutten, now Governor's Island, and allowed to roam at large there until a proper enclosure could be constructed for them upon the island of Manhattan. The necessary clearing and enclosure was commenced at once, and was without doubt the tract of ground extending from a short distance north of the line of the present Beaver Street to a line about forty or fifty feet north of the present Wall Street, which latter limit marked the southern boundary of the Vinj^ or Damen farm, which must have been soon established after the period above mentioned. It is uncertain whether this enclosure extended farther west than the present Broadway, though it is quite probable that it reached the North River shore : upon the east it probably extended a short distance east of the present William Street. This tract, or the portion of it east of Broadway, formed the reserved land or pasture of the West India Company, which, as we have seen (ante, page 9), was in 1638 leased to Jan Jansen Damen, having been then supplanted by the later pasture-ground, or " commons," now forming the City Hall Park and its vicinity. The land thus enclosed, however, was nearly cut in twain by the as yet undrained swamp along the present Broad Street, and a passageway became necessary to the eastern portion of the enclosure ; from the rude bridge thrown across the brook which drained the swamp, a narrow lane led along the line of the present South William Street, and turning northwards near the spot now occupied by the western end of THE SLYCK STEEGH 153 the well-known Delmonico building which stands at the in- tersection of South William and Beaver streets, it reached the pasture at a point a little north of the line of the latter street. The northern turn to this lane became unnecessary after the opening of Smith's Street (present William Street) in 1656 or 1657, and tliat portion of it was granted within a few years thereafter to private parties. It is shown, upon " the Duke's Plan " of 1661, and upon the Nicoll plan of 1668, as still partially open, but built upon and obstructed. After Hoogh (Stone) Straet had become a thoroughfare along the river, an opening was made from the lane into the latter street, and this still exists under the name Mill Street or Lane, a mere open passageway between two buildings. As might be supposed, this narrow lane running through low ground and trodden at first by the negro wood-choppers and bark-gatherers of the West India Company, then by the cattle driven to and from the pasture field, and eventually abutted upon by the rear of the houses and lots along Hoogh Straet, was never considered a particularly choice locality. It was not until 1672 that it was ordered to be paved, and then apparently only with foot-paths. In the Oude Zyd, or old quarter of the City of Amsterdam, there was a narrow street of just about the same length as this lane, running between two of the canals of the city. It was situated in a district replete with interesting associations ; standing at the western end of this street, where it opened upon the canal known as the Achter Burg Wal, one saw at his left several ancient buildings whose arched gateways opened into spacious en- closures, — these were relics of the old Romanist days, two convents long before suppressed and converted into a portion of the Great Hospital of Amsterdam ; beyond them was the old church of the Knights Templars, and the ancient Turf Market ; these edifices and grounds half surrounded another building, of a very different character, on the opposite side of the Achter Burg Wal canal and at its termination; it was the famous Heerelogement, — the City Hostelry, open to none but persons of standing and distinction ; its capacious quad- 154 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE rangle stood surrounded by moats like a fortress, and was ap- proached over an arched bridge. To the right of the observer, across the same canal, was another famous building, — the ancient convent of St. Cecilia, changed in the year 1594 to another hostelry of exclusive character, known as the Prins- senhof, which was associated with the names of many per- sons of distinction who had sojourned there : prominent among these were Marie de M^dicis, Queen of France, and her beau- tiful but unfortunate daughter, Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I., King of England. The other, or eastern end of this street, also opened out upon noteworthy localities : immedi- ately to the right were the walls of the Oude Mannen Huys, or Home for the Aged, — one of the noble charities of the good Hester Klaas, in the sixteenth century ; while at the distance of two or three blocks to the left stood the Dol Huys, or Hospital for the Insane, — likewise a sixteenth-century foundation ; and beyond this was the great house of the East India Company. Notwithstanding the proximity of its lofty neighbors, how- ever, the little street in question remained very unassuming indeed, and had received the humble appellation of Slyck Straet, or the Muddy Street. It was perhaps in remembrance of this street at home — since nearly every street in New Amsterdam bore the name of a corresponding street in the old city — that the lane we have been describing received the designation of Slyck Steegh. When the English began to come into the town, after the surrender in 1664, the names of the streets were changed or modified in many instances. The Slyck Steegh is spoken of in certain deeds about the year 1679 as " Dirty Lane," and about 1683, as " the Mude Street." Al- though Dirty Lane was a familiar, not to say prominent, London street in the seventeenth centurj^^ the name never became 1 " He mounted synod-men, and rode 'em To Dirty Lane and Little Sodom," etc. [Butler's Hudibras, Part IL, Canto i., 367.] In 1830, besides the historic "Dirty Lane" of "Hudibras," — in Southwark, near the notorious " Mint," — there was another street, with the same official desig- THE OLD BARK MILL 155 popular in New York, and the Slyck Steegh gradually came to be called, from the horse-mill upon it (of which we shall speak). Mill Street or Lane. It retained this name till about 1882,1 when it was extended through into William Street, and its former historic name was changed to the singularly inap- propriate one of South William Street. However uninviting the Slyck Steegh may have been from an aesthetic point of view, New Yorkers should not forget that upon its northern side was erected, in 1626, the earUest build- ing in New Amsterdam, of which the site can be pointed out at the present day. By a communication from the colony in the above year,^ it is stated that Francois Molemaecker (the mill- Wright) is employed in the construction of a horse mill, with a spacious room, to accommodate a large congregation, and it was at that time also proposed to add to it a tower, in which the bells captured by the Dutch and brought from Porto Kico were to be hung. This mill, with its small belfry tower, the conical roof of which can be distinguished in the Justus Danckers View of New Amsterdam, of about 1650, was erected upon the north side of the lane afterwards known as the Slyck Steegh, and upon ground at present covered by the buildings Nos. 32 and 34 South William Street, occupied as a wine storehouse. The mill, which was one of three erected by the West India Company at its new settlement,^ was employed in the grinding of bark to be used for tanning purposes, and its location near the edge of the Broad Street swamp was doubt- less determined by the availability of the ground for tan pits. Here, then, in the loft, or upper story of the bark mill, in nation, in the Strand, near the Savoy, and still another one in Shoreditch, not very far from St. Leonard's chnrch. 1 In the eighteenth century, it was occasionally spoken of as "The Jews' Lane," from the Jewish synagogue which stood upon its north side. 2 Set forth in Wagenaar's Hist. Verhael., Amst., 1621-32. ' The others were wind-mills, one a saw-mill situated on Nutten or Governor's Island ; the other, a grist-mill, seems to have stood upon the bluff above the North River shore, a short distance northwest of the fort. Upon its accidental destruc- tion by fire, a uew one was built a little southwest of the fort. It is the earlier grist-mill which is shown in the Hartgers View of New Amsterdam, of about 1632. 156 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE 1628, Dominie Jonas Michaelis assumed the charge of the first religious congregation within the limits of the present State of New York, He was a man of middle age, who was born in North Holland in 1577, and who had entered as a divinity student at Leyden, in the year 1600, where he is said to have been contemporaneous with the famous Dutch scholar, Ger. Johannes Vossius, and with Jacob Cats, who afterwards attained such great fame as a poet, in the Netherlands. Of his further history we know but little, save that it is stated that he was settled as pastor at Nieuwbokswoude, a village in North Holland, in 1612, and two years later, in the church at Hem (Hemsteede ?). In 1624, upon the taking of San Salvador, in Brazil, from the Portuguese, by the Dutch Admiral, Heyn, Dominie Michaelis received the appointment of minister at that place. The town being retaken in the next year by the Portuguese, however, MichaeUs was transferred to the Dutch possessions on the coast of Guinea, then recently captured from the Portuguese ; he did not remain here long, however, for in 1627 he returned to the Netherlands, and in January of the following year he sailed for New Amsterdam. He was evi- dently a man of considerable mental attainments, for at New Amsterdam he preached at times in the French language to the Walloon settlers. His sole literary remains of which we have knowledge are to be found in a letter to the fatherland, bearing date August 11, 1628, in which he appears to be an earnest and patient minister of the Christian religion, struggling against more than common trials in the new country in which he had cast his lot.^ Both Dominie Michaehs and his congregation must have often found themselves contrasting painfully the new condi- tions surrounding them with the old. Among the men and women who met here to worship, there were those who remem- bered the Oude Kerk — the old church — of Amsterdam, with its thirty environing chapels, dark with the very rich- ness of their stained glass adornment, and wliere a score of many-branched lustres shed a soft hght on the benches of the 1 See the letter, with notes of Doctor O'Callaghan, in 2 N. Y. Col. Doc. 763. DOMINIE MICHAELIS AND HIS CHURCH 157 grave magistrates of the city, and on the marble tombs of great men who had died for their country on land and on sea, in the yet unfinished war for Dutch independence ; others had mem- ories of the great church of St. Lawrence at Rotterdam, look- ing down majestically upon the placid canals which environed it, and upon the statue of that giant of intellect, Erasmus ; some had listened to the chiming of the four hundred bells of the "New Church" of Delft, or had contemplated with reverence the tomb of William the Silent in that famous edifice; some had worshipped in the subKme cathedral of Antwerp, the lofty and solemn Gothic arches of which were a sermon in them- selves. Now, from the windows of their unadorned loft over the bark mill on the edge of Blommaert's Vly, they looked northward over a rough pasture-field gently sloping up to a low ridge of hills, where the trees which then covered the Pine Street and Cedar Street of to-day were gradually disap- pearing under the axes of the negro wood-choppers ; looking to the east, between them and the East River shore, and upon the broad river itself, and in the Long Island forests beyond, no signs of human life were discernible, unless perchance an Indian canoe or two paddled along the shore; only to the southwest, across the narrow swamp which intervened, a few thatched cottages clustered around the slowly rising walls of the fort. To many of the congregation of Dominie Michaelis in this rude place of worship, the lessons of religion must have appealed with peculiar force amidst the hardships and uncer- tainties with which they were surromided, and in the loss of most of the old associations of their fives. Death came, too, and within these rough walls often sounded the solemn words of the reader : " Ik ben de opstanding en het leven ; die in mij gelooft, zal leven, al ware hij ook gestorven ; en een iegelijk die leeft, en in mij gelooft, zal niet sterven in eeuwigheid," — recalling to his hearers the profound mystery of the Resurrection and the Life ; even the good Dominie himself must have heard them with new emotions when, in the very year of his arrival, he, with his two fittle motherless daughters, fol- 158 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE lowed the funeral procession of his deceased wife over the little bridge, across the Marckveldt, and to the barren spot just north of it, upon a hillock overlooking the North River, where the dead of the new settlement slept their last sleep in umnarked graves. The retirement of Dominie Michaelis, and the advent of Dominie Bogardus, in 1633, was marked by the erection of a separate church building near the river shore, and upon the present Pearl Street, of which previous mention has been made.^ The bark mill, no longer required for public uses,2 seems to have been in part turned into quarters for some of the negro slaves of the West India Company. In a deed of 1643, this, with a parcel of land adjacent, is spoken of as " the negroes' plantation," being doubtless a vegetable plot culti- vated by them ; in another instrument, of 1656, it is alluded to as " the house the negroes live in." Somewhere about this latter period, a new bark mill was established by private parties, very near the southwest corner of the present Broad Street and Exchange Place, and the old mill, which was under the control of the Deaconiy of the Church in 1660 (and which may, indeed, have been so controlled from the period of its use as a church), was sold in 1663 to Govert Loockermans, and remained in existence many years.^ The only other house which appears to have existed upon the Slyck Steegh, in 1655, was that of Evert Duyckink. This man, who was a glassmaker from Borcken, in Westphalia, a small town a few miles beyond the boundary of the Nether- lands, received a grant of somewhat more than half an acre of ground upon the north side of the Slyck Steegh, in 1643. Marrying, two or three years later, Hendrickje Simons, a young woman from his own district in Westphalia, he appears to have built upon this ground, and to have resided here a 1 See ante, page 58. 2 It seems to be the mill referred to in a report of 1638 to the West India Company, as being then out of repair. ^ In 1667 Loockermans sold the old mill to Jacques Cousseau; the latter sold the premises to Carsten Jansen in January, 1671, and in 1679 Janseu's executor Bold the same to Clement Sebrah. EVERT DUYCKINK'S HOUSE 159 number of years .^ The location of his house is uncertain, but there are some reasons for supposing that it stood nearly one hundred feet east of the bark mill, and upon or very near the site of the present buildings, Nos. 20 and 22 South William Street, but some twenty-live feet or more back from the north side of the lane. In 1674, Duyckink, who had some time before removed to another part of the town, sold his house on Slyck Steegli, with what then remained of his original plot (being in size about three city lots), to Jacob Melyn, the son of Director-General Stuyvesant's old antago- nist, Cornells Melyn. Jacob Melyn held this property for many years, but it does not seem to have been a profitable invest- ment for him, for in or about 1697, he being then a resident of Boston, we find him giving a letter of instruction to Abraham Schelhnger of Easthampton, Long Island (who was probably his nephew, the son of his sister Cornelia, wife of Jacob Schellinger, already referred to), to repair to New York and endeavor to sell his house on Mill Street, " and if no sayle can be obtained, nor person be to be gott to live in 't on any acct., then to naile up doors and windows with roff boards, and secure the glass." The agent was not, however, forced to this last resort of a disgusted landlord, for in May, 1697, he sold the premises to Doctor Johannes Kerf byl, formerly of Amsterdam, a prominent physician of his day in the city. Doctor Kerfbyl was a resident of the city as early as 1686, when we find him dwelling upon the west side of Broad Street. He is said to have been a graduate of Leyden, and was at one time a member of the Governor's Council at New York, but his success excited jealousy among some of his neighbors, and he was denounced as a "charlatan." It was probably the Doctor's son, of tlie same name as his father, who was natu- ralized by Act of Parliament, in 6 Anne (1707). As for the ^ His family included Cornelis Jansen, an orphan lad of thirteen years at the period of our survey, whose parents had been killed by the Indians at their farm at Sapokanicau (tlie later Greenwich), in the war of 1643. Their three children, aged respectively four, three, and one years of age, at that time, were received Jito different families in the town. 160 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE Doctor himself, he must have died soon after his purchase of this property in 1697. The premises then passed into the hands of Jewish purchasers, and became the site of the first Jewish synagogue in New York, which was estabhshed here between the years 1697 and 1700.^ ^ The closed portion, or northerly turning (before referred to) of the Slyck Steegh, appears to have been in part in the possession of one Richard Elliott, a cooper, in the latter part of the seventeenth century. This man, who was a resi- dent of New York as early as 1672, dwelt here for many years with his wife and four sons. Of the latter, three died young and unmarried, while the fourth son, Henry, went to sea about the year 1701, and was never again heard of. Both Elliott and his wife died prior to the year 1714, and as no person appeared to claim any interest in the property, it remained apparently ownerless till 1721, when, under the legal procedure then in force, tlie property was adjudged to have escheated to the British Crown for want of heirs. Thereupon the Council made the following curious order, — a handsome tribute to the worthy and modest pastor of the little French Huguenot Church on King (now Pine) Street: "For- asmuch as his Majesty's Council of this province did conceive that the granting thereof " (that is, of Letters Patent of the escheated land) " as an encouragement to learning, could not but be acceptable to his Majesty, and that they knew not of a more proper and deserving person of such favor than Mr. Lewis Rou, minister of the French Church in this city, who in Divinity, History, and Cronology [sic], and many other parts of learning, is as great a master as any in his Majesty's colonies in America ; " they therefore give their assent to the issuing of Letters Patent to him. This is apparently the property now occupied by the rear addi- tion, upon South William Street, of the Delmonico building. CHAPTER XIV THE HOUSES OF BARENT JANSEN, JAN NAGEL, CLAES CARSTENSEN, AND JOCHEM C ALDER.- PIETER AN- DRIESSEN AND HIS TROUBLES WITH THE INDIANS.— NICHOLAS DE MEYER. — WESSEL EVERTSEN, THE FISH- ERMAN—RUT JACOBSEN UPON the north side of Hoogh (Stone) Straet, and im- mediately east of the ground where, soon after the period of our survey, Jacob van Couwenhoven erected his brewery, already mentioned, there stood, in the year 1655, three small houses in close juxtaposition. The eight-story yellow brick building of an electrical construction company, which now covers the site of these humble dwellings, towers above the surrounding warehouses, as the cottages them- selves were over-towered in the seventeenth century by Van Couwenhoven's "great stone brew-house." The first, or westernmost of these buildings, was the house of Barent Jansen. He was one of the earlier colonists, but hardly anything in relation to him can be gleaned from the records. His very patent or ground-brief for this land can- not be found, and its existence is only learned by allusions to it in other instruments. It was a parcel of about thirty-seven English feet frontage upon Hoogh Straet, and it extended back to the Slyck Steegh. Upon its western side it would appear that Barent Jansen must have built a small house at an early date. Intimately connected with Jansen in some way — probably by marriage — was one Claes Carstensen, a Norwegian of middle age, from the village of Sonde in the southern part of Norway. Barent Jansen must have died before the spring of 1647, 11 162 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE for in March of that year a grant which had been made to him, of fifty morgens, or about one hundred acres of land on the west side of the Hudson River, but for which he had never received his ground-brief, was vested, by the Director and Council in Claes Carstensen. In what way this latter individual obtained an interest in the Hoogh Straet property we do not know; but soon after 1647 he is found in posses- sion of a small house upon the easterly half of the Jansen grant, which house he sold a few years after that date to Jan Nagel. As to the house upon the westerly side of the plot, supposed to have been built by Barent Jansen, it appears in 1662 as then in the joint occupation and tenure of Claes Carstensen and of Jan Barentsen Kunst, probably the young son of Barent Jansen. Claes Carstensen, together with Jan Forbus (usually spoken of as Jan de Swede), Pieter Jansen Noorman, Dirck Volckertsen and Jacob Haes, formed a little clique of Scandinavians, closely associated in various enterprises, and owners at an early date of a large portion of the lands em- braced in the present Williamsburgh and Green Point in Brooklyn. 1 The dwelling-house held by Claes Carstensen upon the eastern part of Barent Jansen's ground, as above mentioned, was sold by him in 1653 to Jan Nagel, who resided here at the time of our survey. This man, who was from Limburg in the Netherlands, had come to New Amsterdam, like many others among the colonists, as a soldier in the employ of the West India Company, and is spoken of in 1647 as "late cadet" in that service; in later years he was commonly known as "Sergeant Nagel." Jan Nagel must have died about the year 1657, but his son, of the same name,2 became prominent some twenty years later, as one of 1 Carstensen was, it seems, in high repute among the colonists on account of his acquaintance with the Indian language. Riker, in his " History of Harlem," states that he acted as interpreter, upon the occasion of the treaty with the Indians at the general gathering upon Sclireyers Hoek, south of the fort, on August 30, 1645. 2 This son, who was born in 1653, seems to have been really named Jeuriaen THE NAGEL FARMHOUSE 163 the earlier settlers of the town of Haerlem, who with his associate Jan Dykman, ancestor of the family of that name, restored to cultivation the farms on the extreme northern end of Manhattan Island, which had been devastated by the Indians in 1655, and had lain waste and abandoned for more than a score of years. The small antiquated yellow farm- house, which, with its decaying orchard and neglected fields, — almost the last remnants of the farming days of Manhattan Island, — was still to be seen as late as the beginning of the year 1901 upon the banks of the Harlem River just below King's Bridge, and which often excited the curious attention of the traveller approaching New York City on the trains of the New York Central Railway, must have stood very near the site — if not exactly upon it — of the Nagel farmhouse of the seventeenth century ; ^ and the uncared-for burial-ground of several generations of that family lies a few hundred feet west of the site of the house. The spot, with its memories of Indian warfare, of the murdered Tobias Teunissen, and of the marching, counter-marching, and fighting of Americans, British, and Hessians in the War of the Revolution, ought to have been preserved and maintained by the City of New York, as one of the very few surviving mementos of early days. But to return to our survey of Hoogh Straet ; the third, or easternmost of the three small houses previously spoken of as occupying, in the year 1655, the site of the present large building known as Nos. 31 to 35 Stone Street, was the cottage of one Jochem Calder, who had obtained a ground- brief for the land in 1645, and who seems to have built within a short time thereafter upon the westerly side of his plot of about thirty-seven English feet in frontage. Very little Jansen Nagel, but, like many others of the colonists, he was rarely known by his christened name. He married, while still very young, Rebecca, the daughter of Resolved Waldron. ^ It was destroyed by fire soon after the date above mentioned. The small Dntch bricks which are worked into the substantial foundations of this house afford additional support to the statements in the text. 164 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE information, however, can be gathered from the records respecting this man; he had died prior to 1659, in which year his widow Magdalena married Gysbert Teunissen. Passing over two garden spots, or vacant places, belonging to this last-mentioned plot and to the next one, we come to the house of Pieter Andriessen, upon the site of which at the present day stands the building No. 41 Stone Street. Andriessen was a native of the province of Brabant, in the Netherlands, and came over to New Amsterdam in 1639 in the ship " De Brant van Trogen " (" The Conflagration of Troy"), with Captain Jocliem Pietersen Kuyter and Jonas Bronck. Upon their arrival at New Amsterdam, Andriessen and one Laurens Duytts, his fellow-passenger upon the vessel, were hired by Jonas Bronck to undertake the clearing of a tract of five hundred acres which Bronck purchased from the Indians upon his arrival, and which lay upon the mainland beyond the Harlem River; it covered what is now known as Morrisania, and Pieter Andriessen and his co-laborer were therefore the pioneers of the present Borough of the Bronx.^ How long Andriessen was employed upon Bronck's land we are not informed. Jonas Bronck died about the year 1643, and his property passed into other hands. In 1645, Andries- sen obtained the grant of his lot of about thirty-seven feet front on Hoogh Straet, and no doubt soon built there, as the officers of the West India Company were, as a rule, disposed to insist upon a speedy improvement of plots granted by them in the town. In the fall of the same year, however, he also acquired a farm of about one hundred and fifty acres upon the East River shore of Long Island, being a tract upon which one Jan Jacobsen Carpenel, familiarly known as Jan of Haerlem, had previously begun a clearing. This farm, which covered the middle portion of the locality along the ^ The agreement between Bronck, Andriessen, and Duytts in 1639, is still extant. Bronck was to advance to the two men 121 florins to pay their board upon the ship. The two were to have liberty to plant tobacco and maize upon Bronck's land upon condition that they should break up a certain quantity of new land every two years, surrendering the other to the owner, for the planting of grain. PIETER ANDRIESSEN'S FARM 165 East River shore, generally known some years ago as Ravens- wood, extended about half a mile back from the river to a small stream called in later times Sunswick Creek, which is yet to be seen flowing through a narrow salt meadow. The site of the farmhouse here was nearly opposite the foot of the present Fifty-fifth Street on Manhattan Island. Pieter Andriessen, however, had an additional occupation to that of a farmer ; he was a chimney-sweep, — an employment of considerable importance in those days of wood fires and of thatched roofs, — and from that fact he was commonly known in the town as Pieter de Schoorsteenveger. As this occupation of Pieter must have necessitated his frequent attendance in the town, and as he does not appear to have married till a comparatively late day, he seems to have been in the habit of shifting his quarters backward and forward between his house on Hoogh Straet and his plantation on Long Island, as occasion might require. Neither of these establishments was on a very magnificent scale, it is probable, and the farm on Long Island seems to have been tenanted by several negro slaves of Andriessen. In 1648, Pieter Andriessen appears in the list of tavern- keepers in the settlement. As, however, his house upon Hoogh Straet was directly opposite the " Great Tavern " of the West India Company (afterwards the Town House), it is hardly probable that he would have been permitted to main- tain a tavern there, and he is much more likely to have kept liquor upon tap at his Long Island farm, to accommodate his few neighbors and their workmen, as well as the wood- cutters, quarrymen, and boatmen whose employment called them up and down along the East River. In September, 1655, after the outbreak of the Indian troubles of that year, there was a general flight to New Amsterdam of the panic-stricken settlers who had survived the first onslaught of the Indians. Hastily throwing their personal effects into the boats with which most of them were provided as means of conveyance, and turning loose into the woods the cattle, which in general they could not remove, 166 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE tliey abandoned their exposed plantations, and with their families took refuge under the guns of Fort Amsterdam. Unlike the Indian attacks of 1643-4-4, that of 1655 was directed, in many instances, not so much to murder and to general devastation, as to securing captives for the sake of a ransom. In this way the abandoned plantations were often spared, in the hope apparently of entrapping the colonists. Four weeks had gone by since the first attack by the Indians, when Pieter Andriessen determined to take a party out to his plantation on Long Island, in order to try to re- cover some of his cattle. The party, consisting of Andriessen and five others, sailed up the East River one October morning, and finding nothing to alarm them, landed at Andriessen's farm, and set about scouring the neighboring woods and thickets for the animals. The Dutch, however, had been discovered by a party of Indians, Avho, to the number of about thirty, set upon them and took them all prisoners. Sending two of their captives back to New Amsterdam, with a statement of what the captors required in the way of cloth, lead, gunpowder, kettles, guns, knives, shoes, axes, etc., — as a ransom, — the savages retained Andriessen and three of his companions as their prisoners, all but one of these being wounded. As, however, Andriessen's party had left the town without the knowledge and consent of the military authorities, and indeed against an express prohibition, the Director and Council, after much discussion of the case, declined to act for various reasons, one of which was "be- cause when the other savages, who keep yet seventy-three prisoners of our nation, understood that such an extravagant ransom ^ has been paid for four, tliey would demand a more enormous sum." Andriessen and his comrades, therefore, remained in the hands of the savages for a while longer; but within a couple of weeks, — apparently stimulated by the threat of the Indians, to carry the remaining captives into the interior of the country — the authorities at New Amsterdam 1 The value of the goods required may have amounted to $150 or $200 of the present currency. DE RUYTER'S CHICKEN EXPEDITION 167 came to an agreement with the natives respecting the amount of ransom, and most or all of the prisoners were restored. Matters, however, remained in a very unsettled condition, in spite of the apparent settlement with the Indians; and frequent reports of depredations in the vicinity of New Amsterdam (of which the natives generally disclaimed any knowledge), kept the community in a constant state of uncer- tainty and dread. While things were in this state, there sat, on the night of the 4th of November of this year, 1655, around a blazing fire on the wide kitchen hearth of Pieter Andriessen's rough farmhouse near the East River shore, his negro slave Stephen, and a crony of the latter. Captain Francis Fyn's negro man, who had rowed across from his master's farmhouse on Varcken (now Blackwell's) Island, for a social evening. With this pair of worthies was Claes de Ruyter, a Dutchman of jovial disposition from New Amster- dam, who is understood to have been a former trooper in the West India Company's service. The negro Stephen had evidently been sent to take charge of his master's property, either because he ran comparatively little risk of being car- ried off by the Indians, or because Pieter Andriessen himself was not yet recovered from the effects of his late encounter with the savages. The presence of Claes de Ruyter, how- ever, at this time and place, is not susceptible of so easy an explanation. Rations seem to have been rather scanty with the party at Pieter Andriessen's house; the keen autumn air had given them sharp appetites; and as the long evening wore away, some one — we will suppose it was Stephen — remembered that there were some chickens left upon the farm of the nearest neighbor, Joris Stevensen de Caper. The trio promptly agreed that these fowls ought not to be left for the Indians, or for wolves, wild-cats, and foxes, and an expe- dition was determined upon to recover some, at least, of them. A walk of about a mile, over rough pasture-fields, and through woods and thickets, brought the party in sight of the low farmhouse of Joris Stevensen. This house, of 168 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE which all vestiges have long ago disappeared, was situated on the edge of the salt marshes nearly half a mile east of the present Queens County Court House in Long Island City, — just where De Caper, or "the sailor," could bring his market- boat almost to the door of his house by sailing up a small creek called Canapaukah, a branch of the Mespat Kill, or present Newtown Creek. Joris Stevensen's family had abandoned their exposed dwelling, as had most of the farmers' families in the country, but the men came to the farm occasionally to attend to necessary work. To guard against any interference by possible inmates of the house, the marauding party commenced operations by a vigorous battering against the door of the house, accompanied by a whole storm of blood-curdling yells and war-whoops, in which we may suppose that Claes de Ruyter, who was familiar with the Indians, and who often acted as go-between for them and for the whites, bore a prominent part. The expedition was, in short, entirely successful, and Claes and his companions returned to Pieter Andriessen's farmhouse, where they calmly proceeded to pluck and to dress their plunder. In the mean time the Joris Stevensen farm had not been entirely deserted. That individual himself, together with his father-in-law, Harmen Hendricksen, and one Teunis Jansen van Commel, had been engaged during the day in threshing out some grain, and at night had disposed them- selves to sleep in the barn. Scared almost out of their wits by the supposed Indian attack, and fearing to be discovered or burned in the barn, they had escaped into the night and sought places of concealment for themselves in various directions. One of the fugitives made his way across the jEields to the house of his neighbor Andriessen ; here he dis- covered a light, and approaching carefully to reconnoitre, he heard, to his great joy, some conversation in Dutch; there- upon he boldly entered the house, where his appearance was about as agreeable to Claes de Ruyter and the negroes as was that of Banquo's ghost to Macbeth in the banqueting hall BURNING OF JACOB HAES'S HOUSE 169 at the palace of Fores. The party had, in fact, just spitted Joris Stevensen's fowls, and were caught red-handed. Claes was profuse in his apologies, expatiated on the desperation of starving men, promised to pay for the fowls when he returned to town, and incidentally suggested that it was not necessary to say anything about a trifling matter of this kind. News of this affair found its way to New Amsterdam, however, and produced a considerable effect upon the author- ities there, for it showed them that other agencies besides the Indians might be at work keeping up the state of disorder in the country. While this occurrence was yet fresh, on the morning of the 8th of November, 1655, the people of New Amsterdam were again excited by a spectacle which had been too common during the preceding few weeks, — a column of smoke rising above the woods from some burning building along the East River shore. The precise location of the fire was not determinable from the town, but soon news arrived from up the river that it was the farmhouse of Jacob Haes, situated beyond the Noormans Kill, on the shore of what is now called Green Point. On this same morning, Director- General Stuyvesant, with Nicasius de Sille, one of the mem- bers of his Council, appeared before the court of burgomasters in the Town Hall with a request, which was duly entered upon the minutes of that body, "that the fiscal rigidly examine Tennis Jansen as to what he saw at the house of Pieter Schoorsteenveger; whereas, now Jacob Haey's house is burning, and it might possibly happen in the same manner." An examination into the late pranks of Claes de Ruyter followed, accordingly, but we do not find that it threw any light upon the later affair, and the matter seems to have been dropped without any further proceedings. Stuyvesant and his Council were determined, however, to prevent troubles of this sort in future ; and upon the 18th of January, 1656, followed the famous "Order against Isolated Plantations," commanding all the subjects of the Colony to settle close to 170 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE one another in villages, neighborhoods, and hamlets, by the following spring, imposing a penalty upon such persons as remain upon exposed plantations, and giving them notice that they must not expect any aid from the authorities in case of trouble with the natives. Four years later, in fact, owing to frequent disregard of the ordinance, notice was given by the Council to farmers still living uj)on isolated farms, to pull down their houses, and it is believed that a few houses were actually destroyed under the orders of the authorities, before the surrender to the English, in 1664, rendered the ordinance of the Council obsolete. After these proceedings of the Council, there is room to suppose that Pieter Andriessen became, for a time at least, a permanent resident of his house on Hoogh Straet. He married, in 1661, Geertruyd Samsens, a widow, and we find that in 1664 he had a daughter, Jannetje, baptized in the Dutch Church; but in 1668 it appears that both he and his wife had died, and two years later the Hoogh Straet house was sold, by the representatives of her estate, to Barent Coersen. Next adjoining the house of Pieter Andriessen upon the east, in a garden of nearly seventy-five feet front upon Hoogh Straet, stood at the time of our survey the dwelling- house of Jacob van Couwenhoven, previously alluded to,^ which was sold in the following year to Nicholas de Meyer. This building was of stone, and of much greater pretensions than most of its neighbors, for at its sale to De Meyer, which was at public auction, it was already mortgaged for about 3500 guilders, or $1400 of the present currency; it stood upon the site of the present buildings, No. 47, and a part of No. 45 Stone Street. This house was occupied as a residence for more than thirty years by Nicholas de Meyer. He was from Hamburg, then claimed to be under the jurisdiction of the Duchy of Holstein, from which cause he was occasionally called by the Dutch of New Amsterdam, Nicolaas van Hol- i See ante, p. 146. Stone Stkeet. Looking- towards Hanover Sciuare. The ancient Hoosh Straet. NICHOLAS DE MEYER 171 steyn. The ordinary appellation of De Meyer (that is, the "steward" or "farmer") seems, however, to have been preferred by Nicholas and his descendants, and became the family name. Nicholas had married, in 1655, Luda, or Lydia, daughter of the ex-fiscal, or prosecutor, Hendrick van Dyke ; he became, in later years, a man of considerable prominence in the city, having been one of the magistrates in 1664, at the time of the surrender to the English. After- wards, in 1676,* he was mayor of the city. He was a man of active business interests and took a considerable part in developing the settlement of the village of Haerlem, where he had purchased various parcels of land amounting to between sixty and seventy acres in extent; he also owned a wind-mill near the intersection of the present Chatham and Duane streets, and a brewery in the Smits VJy, or modern Pearl Street, near Piatt Street. After the death of Nicholas de Meyer, in 1690, the property upon Stone Street was divided, and the original homestead passed to his daughter Anna Catrina, wife of Jan Willemsen Noering. The eldest son of Nicholas, Wilhelmus or William de Meyer, became a prominent citizen of Esopus and Kingston in the present county of Ulster. As we advance along the road, or "High Street," farther eastwards from the fort, the plots granted to settlers become larger, for they were given at a time when there was no immediate likelihood of a demand for the land for the con- struction of dwellings. In this way, Wessell Evertsen, the next neighbor to Van Couwenhoven and to Nicholas de Meyer, obtained in 1646 the grant of a parcel of land with a frontage of nearly two hundred and twenty-five feet along the road, and extending back to the Slyck Steegh. Evertsen came from the old town of Naerden, upon the south coast of the Zuyder Zee, some thirteen or fourteen miles east of Amsterdam, — an interesting place, with many a tradition of Spanish atrocities perpetrated here in the war for inde- pendence; a picturesque spot, too, where the flat western 172 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE coast of the Zuyder Zee, and the interminable dyked meadows in the direction of Amsterdam, give place to the heights of Gooiland; and where, to the observer gazing southeastward, — *' A brighter, livelier scene succeeds ; In groups the scattering wood recedes, Hedge-i'ows, and huts, and sunny meads, And corn-fields glance between," — till he might well imagine himself among the fields of Kent or of Essex, rather than in a corner of the province of Holland. Having come to New Amsterdam, Evertsen married, in 1643, Geertje Bouwhens, a young woman from his old home, and had probably built upon his plot on Hoogh Straet, as early as 1645, a year or so before he obtained his ground- brief. He was a seafaring man, and in 1648 is spoken of as "late master of the yacht Saint Martin;" but his main occupation, which he followed for many years at New Amsterdam, was that of a fisherman, and from his house, which, adjoining a capacious garden, stood about upon the site of the present building. No. 55 Stone Street, a path or lane, which remained open for many years, led down directly to the mooring-place of his boats upon the East River shore. A couple of hundred feet to the west of this last-mentioned spot was the tall building of the city tavern, for the bright lio-hts of which Wessell Evertsen had doubtless often strained his eyes, sailing up the bay, belated on his fishing trips, — much as he might have watched, at home in the fatherland, for the lights of the historic Castle of Muyden on the Zuyder Zee, as he ran up, on dark nights, from Amsterdam to Naerden, through the broad channel of the Pampus. Here, then, upon Hoogh Straet, Wessell Evertsen lived for many years, and saw a large family grow up around him. The extreme eastern end of his plot of ground he had sold as early as 1649 to one Rut Jacobsen, but he retained the balance of it till about 1657, when the increasing demand for ELLIOTT'S ALLEY 173 building lots in the town induced him to sell one small parcel after another, till in the course of live or six years he had disposed of all the ground except that in the immediate vicinity of his dwelling-house. Evertsen appears to have died shortly before 1670, but the place remained in the pos- session of his descendants as late as the year 1726. The parcel of land just before alluded to as forming the eastern end of Wessell Evertsen 's grant, and as having been sold by him in 1649 to Rutger (commonly known as Rut) Jacobsen, must have been built upon by the latter at about the period named, and it was doubtless at the same time that the narrow lane bounding it upon the west, and which formed the southerly turn to the Slyck Steegh, was laid out. This passageway, under the name of Mill Lane, is still to be seen opening into Stone Street, as was previously noticed ; ^ and the site of Jacobsen 's plot is at present occupied by a low but spacious brick building of two stories, conspicuous for its large windows, and occupied by the Board of Marine Underwriters. The entrance to this structure is upon South William Street, where was originally the rear of Jacobsen's premises. As for the passageway now called Mill Lane, and sometimes Mill Street, it was known for a time, about the end of the seventeenth century, as EUet's or Elliott's Alley, from Richard Elliott, previously mentioned (ante, page 160, note), who lived just at its head upon the Slyck Steegh. Rutger Jacobsen, at the time of his purchase of this property upon Hoogh Straet, was a resident of Rensselaerswyck ^ (now Albany), and although he undoubtedly resided at times in New Amsterdam, he does not appear to have given up his citi- zenship at the former place, for in 1656 he was one of the mag- istrates of Rensselaerswyck, and as such, in that year, he laid the corner-stone of the new Dutch Church, the site of which was at the intersection of the present State Street and Broad- 1 See ante, page 153. - Jacobsen came from Schoonrewoerd in the Netherlands, a village some twelve English miles south of Utrecht. His daughter Margrietje married, in 1667, Jan Jansen Bleecker, from Meppel in the province of Overyssel, ancestor of the Bleecker family, well known in the annals of New York. 174 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE way, in the city of Albany. The house at New Amsterdam was retained by Jacobsen till the fall of 1G60, when it was sold at public auction to one Johannes Withart. It would seem to have been used by Rut Jacobsen either as a place of tempo- rary residence for himself and family when in New Amster- dam, or as a storehouse connected with the North River trade, he having been, as early as 1649, the owner of a sloop plying upon the Hudson between Rensselaerswyck and New Amsterdam. After Withart these premises came to be noted as the residence of Nicholas Bayard, long conspicuous in the affairs of the city, mayor in 1685, the deadly personal enemy of Jacob Leisler, and the man above all others respon- sible for the judicial murder of Leisler and his son-in-law Milborne in 1691; bold and turbulent, he pitted himself against the Earl of Bellomont, Governor of the Colony, was himself condemned to death for treason, and very narrowly escaped Leisler's fate. His large farm and country seat west of the Bowery became one of the prominent features of New York in the eighteenth centur}-. He purchased the house upon Stone Street from Johannes Withart in 1685, the year of his mayoralty, but had resided in it for a number of years before that period. CHAPTER XV THE "GREAT TAVERN," AFTERWARDS THE TOWN HALL.— ITS HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL ASSOCIATIONS. — DOM- INIE BOGARDUS'S PARTY.— THE COURTS. — THE SHIRT CASE.— GOVERNOR LOVELACE'S TAVERN The Taverner tooke me b}' the sieve, " S' " sayth he, " will you o' wyne assay ? " I auswerd, " that can not mutch me greve A peny can do no more than it may ; " I dranke a pynt, and for it dyd pay, Yet sore a hungred fro thence I yede, — And wantynge my mony I cold not spede. Lydgate : " Loudon Lyckpeny." THE traveller, in the middle of the seventeenth century, approaching Amsterdam up the broad estuary of the Y, from the Zuyder Zee, and rounding a point of flat meadow- land intersected by canals, where some years later the vast dock-yards, timber wharves, and storehouses of the Admi- ralty and of the East India Company arose, saw at his left hand, stretching for two miles along the shore, the array of houses of that famed city, broken here and there by canals, the mouths of which were occasionally marked by ancient stone towers of quaint form, the survivors of the bulwarks of former days. At a distance of a few hundred feet from the shore extended an apparently interminable double line of " booms," — stout piles driven into the earth and fastened together at the tops by string pieces, and to these were moored an almost countless host of vessels of all descriptions, — '* Meer vloten als hesit de tceerelt, op het Y ; " the smaller craft only were permitted to pass within the line of booms. Sailing by the mouth of the broad Amstel River, 176 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE crowded with boats and barges, as it flowed placidly through the heart of the city, and passing the Haaring pakkers Tooren, — the Herring-packers' Tower, — where it stood guard over the entrance to the canal, called the " Cingel," the voyager saw before him a long pier running out from the shore to a point beyond the line of booms ; at its extremity was a large, high- peaked wooden building, constructed upon piles, moored around which was a swarm of yachts and rowboats of vari- ous descriptions. This building was the Stadts Herbergh, or City Tavern of Amsterdam ; it had been built in the early part of the seventeenth century, to furnish lodging and enter- tainment to seafaring men, and to travellers who might arrive in the city by night-coming vessels, or after the closing of the land gates. The commodious quarters afforded by this tavern, and its agreeable outlook over the land and water, caused it to be held in high repute. About the year 1640, when the trade of New Amsterdam was already considerably extended, it was thought desirable, by the officers of the West India Company, to afford better accommodations for strangers in the town than were furnished by the small and rude taverns which already existed there. It was decided to establish, somewhat after the pattern of Amsterdam, a Stadts Herbergh, or City Tavern, under the auspices of the West India Company. This building was a substantial edifice of stone, and was completed during the year 1641. It was designedly placed in a very conspicuous position near the shore of the East River, which one of its sides faced, and at the time of its erection it formed a most promi- nent landmark, standing entirely apart from the houses of the town. Back of it lay the road, or Hoogh Straet, from which a lane or passageway on the east side of the building gave access to the open space between it and the shore. This lane, after the City Tavern had become, in 1654, the Stadt Huys, or Town Hall, was frequently spoken of, in English times, as the " State House Lane," or " Hall Lane ; " it exists at the present day as the narrow passageway, known as Coenties Alley, a curious little dark street between high and almost THE STADTS HERBERGH 177 blank walls ; it is overhung by rusty fire-escapes, and furnished with miniature sidewalks, of about two feet wide. The original ground-plot attached to the City Tavern, appears to have been a strip about fifty feet in width, extend- ing from Hoogh Straet to the East River shore, but in the year 1651, upon the confiscation of the adjoining land of Cornells Melyn,i enough of that land appears to have been added to the tavern plot to make the whole parcel about one hundred and five feet in front upon the shore, and a few feet less than that distance upon Hoogh Straet. The premises, so enlarged, seem to have been then surrounded by a fence ; pre- viously, they had been open and unenclosed. The additional ground was doubtless used for a time for garden purposes.'*^ Collating carefully the various deeds for portions of these premises, made from time to time in the eighteenth century, after the Town House had ceased to be used for public pur- poses, — some of which deeds refer expressly to lines of the old building, while other dimensions of the latter result from well-known principles of architecture, — the conclusion is reached that the ground-plan of the City Tavern must have been about forty-two feet front ^ by about thirty-two feet in depth ; in height it contained two stories, with a basement underneath and spacious lofts above.* In the rear of the building was an extension or addition, of which only the eastern wall is definitely fixed ; this appears to have been a long, narrow structure used for kitchen purposes, and prob- ably containing other offices of a similar nature. The present northerly line of Pearl Street would seem to have encroached somewhat upon the site of the City Tavern, as will be seen from the accompanying plan. 1 See ante, page 120. 2 Miuates of the Burgomasters, 15 November, 1658. On Johannes Nevius, the secretary's petition, wliereinhe requests that he may plant the garden behind the Town Hall, — Ordered, that the petitioner may plant the garden, in conjunc- tion with the court messenger. ^ That is to say, its later front upon what is now Pearl Street ; its original front was tov.-ards the west. * Under its steeply pitched roof. 12 178 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE The Stadts Herbergli appears to have been opened for the entertainment of the public about the beginning of the year 1642, Philip Gerritsen from Haerlem being the first landlord,^ and the premises being leased to him and afterwards to Adriaen Gerritsen (who had married Philip's widow), down to the beginning of the year 1652, when we find Abraham Delanoy conducting the tavern. The terms of the lease were sufficiently liberal. Philip was to pay the company three hundred guilders per year, or about $120 of the present currency ; he was to sell the company's wines and brandy only, for which he was to be allowed a profit of six stivers (about twelve cents) per quart, the company agreeing not to allow any wines to be sold at retail out of its cellar, " which might be drunk in clubs, and would tend to the lessee's injury." The Director-General, at the same time, promised to have a well dug near the house, and to cause a brew-house to be put up in the rear of the tavern or else to give the use of the company's brew-house, and moreover to permit a space to be fenced off in the rear of the house. The City Tavern was hardly more than opened before it became historic. Many of the fugitives from the outlying settlements, in the Indian War of 1643, were quartered here. On the 18th of Sej^tember of that year, there arrived in the town the distressed colonists of Achter Col (near the present Elizabethport), which had been destroyed on the preceding night by the Indians. These people, who had collected in a building there, managed with great difficulty to make their escape in a canoe after the house in which they were gathered had been set on fire ; they kept off the Indians by means of their firearms, but lost everything else. They were lodged in a body at the City Tavern at the expense of the West India Company. Here, too, in the beginning of 1651, was quartered the crew of the ship " Nieuw Nederlandsche Fortuyn, " — the vessel of the Baron van der Capellen, — seized and confiscated by order 1 Philip Gerritsen's lease bears date February 17, 1643, but runs from the Ist of January, 1642, for six years. Plan of the Stadt Huys or Town Hall of New Amsterdam Compiled by J. H. INNES Scale, JO feet = ^ incA -^ocj^/i < r^ ^ ■I ~^;-ri>- "'^^i^ //^^ N 1^ Mceg^ .^fr^^t (X>-/^e. aft Sront <^) THE LOOCKERMANS HOUSE 241 It is the fact that Loockermans' house was thus protected, that leads to the conjecture that a portion of it may have been used as his warehouse. The site of this house is now occupied by the two unpretending buildings extending from the Coffee Exchange to the corner of the modern Hanover Street, and numbered 119 and 121 Pearl Street. There can be little doubt that this was the same building shown as occupying this spot in a plan made in the year 1719. This building was, as has been said, of large, and, in fact, of unusually large, dimensions. It was of about tliirty- eight feet in front by forty-eight feet in depth ; and a kitchen extension of about twenty feet square upon its east side gives suggestions of quarters for the domestic slaves,^ as the size of the main building does of its partial use for warehouse purposes. Along the east side of the building ran, in the year last above mentioned, a narrow cartway, now forming a part of what is known as Hanover Street; and nearly a hundred feet in the rear of the house, upon the back lane called "the Sloot," or ditch, stood a capacious stable, or coach-house, some twenty by forty feet in size. It is quite likely, however, that this last structure was built aftei- Loockermans' time. Goveii: Loockermans' first wife had died before 1649, leav- ing him with two little daughters, Marritje and Jannetje, who were respectively about eight and six years of age at the period mentioned. Upon the 20th of July of that year he married, for his second wife, the widow, Marritje Janse. This lady had been the wife of Tymen Jansen, a ship car- penter in the employ of the West India Company, to whose liouse upon the present Pearl Street just north of Wall, we shall have occasion to allude hereafter. Tymen Jansen had been for several years from 1633 the principal shipwright ^ In her will, made in 1677, Loockermans' widow Marritje provides for two of the slave " boys," Manuel and Francis. The former was to be freed at the age of twenty-five : as to the latter, she requires that her children " shall maintain him with dyett and clothing, and good discipline ; not willing, neither desiring that they should sell him alien and transport, neither to deliver him to the service of a stranger." Lib. 1, Wills, N. Y. Surr. OUice. 16 242 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE of the Company, at New Amsterdam, and had constructed many vessels here : he had died some years before 1649, however, leaving his widow with a daughter Elsie, known according to the system of nomenclature in use among the Netherlanders as Elsie Tymense, and who was about fifteen or sixteen years of age at the time of her mother's marriage to Govert Loockermans. Previous to this time, and in the year 1646, Marritje Janse had married Dirck Cornelissen of Wensveen, whose house and land upon the present Hanover Square has just been referred to. Cornelissen died a year or two after his marriage, leaving a son called Cornells Dircksen, an infant of about two years of age at the time of his mother's marriage to Loockermans. By his wife Marritje, Govert Loockermans had one child, Jacob, born in 1652, who in later years, following the English nomenclature, which was gradually adopted by the Dutch after the surrender to the English in 1664, was known as Jacob Loockermans. The above-named persons constituted the family of Govert Loockermans ; and out of their somewhat complicated rela- tionship grew, apparently, certain important consequences in after years. Elsie Tymense did not remain many years in her stepfather's house on the East River shore, for in the early part of 1652 she married a well-to-do merchant, Pieter Cornelissen Van- derveen, from Amsterdam, and resided for a number of years in her husband's house, near the southwest corner of the present Pearl and Whitehall streets, where she was long a close neighbor of Director-General Stuyvesant and his family. Vanderveen having died about the year 1661, Elsie married Jacob Leisler, of Frankfurt,^ two years later, and he, who had come to New Amsterdam in the military service of the West India Company, — Mr. Valentine calls him an "officer," — now assumed the charge of her late husband's business, and soon became, himself, a leading merchant of the town. At his house upon the East River shore, (i overt Loocker- 1 Wliether it was the city of that name upon the Ma3'n River, or that upon the Oder, does not appear. THE RIVER FRONT 243 mans lived an active life for many years. He does not seem to have cared to mingle much in the politics of his day, though in 1647 he was one of the committee called " the Nine Men," chosen by the people, and who afterwards laid the grievances of the colonists before the authorities in the Netherlands. In 1657 he also served one year as one of the city magistrates, or "schepens," and at the same time he also held the office of head or foreman of the fire company. He took an interest besides in the affairs of the city militia company, in which he was a lieutenant at the time of his death, under Captain Martin Cregier. It has been already stated that the Loockermans' house stood within somewhat spacious grounds ; about one hundred and fifty feet in its rear there was a wet depression, where there seems to have been at one time a small pond ; here a drain ditch was afterwards constructed, and this ditch, or " sloot," gave its name to a narrow lane which was in existence here before the year 1728, and was long known as " Sloat Lane." It is now covered by the extension of Beaver Street. Besides thus caring for his rear grounds, Loockermans had an eye to his fine river frontage. At an early day, he had built, at his own expense, a wall or piling all along the shore in front of his premises, in order to protect the bank. Towards the western end of his land and near Burger's Path, there was considerable ground lying between the road and the shore, and Loockermans made a petition to the Director-General and Council in 1656 for a grant of this ground " on which in future some build- ing might be erected to the damage of petitioner." The ground was granted to him accordingly, with the reservation to the West India Company of the right to build a breastwork along the pihng. As has been previously stated, a good por- tion of it, covering the present Hanover Square, was over- grown with forest trees ; these were certainly in existence as late as 1679, for they are shown upon the very valuable sketch of the Labadists, Danker and Sluyter, in that year.^ Within 1 This wooded bank, altliough a very conspicuous feature in any view of tlie East River shore of New Aiasterdaui, does uot appear in that group of views 244 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE ten years from that period, however, the trees had probably all disappeared, and about the year 1690 the " Square" began to be built upon. A row of three or four houses of small size soon occupied the larger part of the ground, and this was used for building purposes until the early part of the last century, when the then existing buildings were destroyed, and the land thrown into the public thoroughfares about it. Govert Loockermans died in the year 1671. Before that time, his two daughters had been married, — the eldest, Marritje, to Balthazar Bayard, a nephew of Director-General Stuyvesant, in 1664 ; and Jannetje to Hans, the son of Dr. Hans Kiersted, in 1667. Govert's son, Jacob, who was about nineteen years of age at his father's death, continued to i-eside for some years witli his mother at the homestead, but after lier death, in 1677, he took up his residence in the Province of Maryland, succeeding to the estates of his father there. He had pursued the study of medicine, and was a practising " chyrurgeon '' in that colony, residing, according to Valentine, at St. Mary's, in the soutliern part of the State. He appears, however, afterwards as a magistrate of Dorchester County, upon tlie eastern shore of Chesapeake Bay. There are not wanting indications of a lack of harmony in the Loockermans family at an early date. When Govert Loockermans died intestate, in 1671, under the English law of descent his son Jacob became the heir to his father's con- siderable landed estate ; Jacob's half-brother, Cornells Dircksen, which, under various uames, such as the " AUaerdt " and the " Seutter " views, etc. (from the names of the publishers in whose works they are to be found), represent substantially one and the same sketch, and that taken at a period some years earlier than the one of the Lahadists, — probably at some time between 1667 and 1669. The reason for this is quite obvious. If tlie grove had been represented in true perspective, it would have concealed from sight a number of houses which the artists desired to make appear in their views of the town. The Labadists resorted to the expedient of dwarfing the grove, while the other draughtsman omitted it altogether from his view, afterwards supplying the houses from some sketch taken from anotlter point, with the result of lamentably distort- ing the perspective of the wliole view, and rendering it unquestionably and grossly inaccurate. It is composed indeed, in all probability, of several distinct sections thus patched together. JACOB LEISLER 245 died young,^ and he also inherited an estate from liim. Jacob appears to have been much more under the influence of Elsie Leisler, his half-sister upon his mother's side, than under that of his half-sisters upon his father's side ; and in 1679, he being then, as stated, a resident of Maryland, he conveyed to Elsie's husband, Jacob Leisler, all his right to the estate in tlie Province of New York of Govert Loockermans, his father, as well as his right to all that which had come to him through his mother — or rather through his half-brother, Cornells Dircksen — from her former husband, Dirck Cornelissen. Nearly the whole estate of Govert Loockermans and of his wife hiid thus come into the hands of his step-daughter Elsie.''^ It is foreign to the purposes of this work to treat at much length of the occurrences which led to the condemnation and execution for treason, on the 16th of May, 1691, of Jacob Leisler, and of liis son-in-law, Jacob jNIilborne.^ It may be sufficient to recall to mind the fact that upon hearing of the Revolution of 1689 in England, which had driven James II. from the throne and replaced him by his daughter Mary and by her royal consort William, Prince of Orange, Governor Dongan of New York abandoned his government of the colony and sailed for England. The question of the day then became, who was to take charge of the affairs of the colony ? At this early period the principles came into play which after- ^ Cornelis Dircksen died in the early part of the year 1678, very soon after the death of his mother. 2 It is true that iu several conveyances of portions of the Govert Loockermans' estate, made within a few years after his death, the two daughters join as parties; but it seems evident that tliis was done either by reason of some agreement for the purpose of quieting dissension, or else to satisfy purchasers who had raised objec- tions growing out of the obscure or ambiguous clause in the Articles of Surrender in 1664, tiiat the Dutcli "shall enjoy their ownecustomes concerning their inlierit- ances." In later conveyances, we find no attention paid to the daughters. It may be further mentioned, in this connection, tliat while Govert Loockermans' widow, Marritje, in her will, executed in 1677, bequeaths various articles of jewelry and other keepsakes to her own children and grandchildren, no mention whatever is made of her two step-daughters. ^ A lucid account of this matter will be found iu Chapter XV. of Mr. D. T. Valentine's " History of New York." 246 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE wards formed the foundation of the controversy which termi- nated in the American Revolution, On the one hand was the party of Legality, whose doctrine was that the colonies, being sunple dependencies of the Crown of England, with their local administrations fixed by the Central Government at London, those administrations ought to continue until they were changed by that Central Government, and tliat consequently, in the present case, the control of affairs, in the absence of instructions from England, ought to remain with the Lieuten- ant-Governor, Francis Nicholson, and the former Council. Prominent among the men of this party were Colonel Nicholas Bayard, the brother-in-law of Marritje Loockermans, and Stephanus van Cortlandt, her cousin, the son of Govert Loockermans' sister Anneken. The other party was the party of Expediency ; they con- sidered that the management of their own affairs ought to belong to the people of the colony. They were not prepared as yet to assert that they " are and of right ought to be " free and independent, but they determined to take possession of what they considered the vacant government. They contrived to oust their opponents, and by means of a self-appointed " Committee of Safety," usually resorted to in similar cases, they conferred the chief power upon their leading man, Jacob Leisler. The legality of this action was of course denied by the opposite party, and in asserting and maintaining his authority, Leisler acted with but little discretion. In spite of the frail nature of his power, he affected to consider his opponents as rebels and traitors, drove the leaders among them from the colony, and confiscated the estates of several of them, and upon their subsequent return to New York he threw Bayard into prison, where he remained for over a year ; while Stephanus van Cortlandt succeeded in making his escape from the officers armed with a warrant for his arrest for high treason. When, finally, in March, 1691, the new governor, Colonel Henry Sloughter, arrived from England, Leisler succeeded, by his punctilios about delivering over the government into the THE EXECUTIONS 247 hands of Sloughter, in creating a hostile feeling in the mem- bers of the new administration; they immediately inclined towards the party of Leisler's opponents, and his arrest, trial, condemnation, and execution for treason followed, together with the similar process in the case of his son-in-law, Jacob Milborne. The malignant haste, however, with which these prose- cutions were urged, and the precipitation with which the sentences w^ere carried out, takes away all merit from the proceedings, and leaves them mere judicial murders. As Leisler's seizure of power — technically illegal, no doubt — ■ was unquestionably made for and in behalf of the reigning sovereigns William and Mary, every one concerned in the prosecution of the prisoners knew perfectly well that William and Mary would never have permitted them to be punished as traitors if the case had reached them in any proper way. However exasperating Leisler's acts had been to his enemies, there were other remedies to redress such wrongs as they had suffered; their e^ddent malice deprived them of any sympathy from the great body of the people, by whom they were looked upon in no other light than as murderers, while their victims were glorified as heroes and martyrs. As for Elsie Leisler and her children, the blow fell upon them with crushing force. Four years afterwards the Eng- lish Parliament reversed the attainder for treason of Leisler and Milborne, and restored their confiscated property to their heirs ; but most of the joy of life had departed for Elsie Leisler. Always she could see before her that dark May morning, with the rain pouring down upon the scaffold and the angry or pitying crowd around it, and could hear the words of her son-in-law : " We are thoroughly wet with rain, but in a little time we shall be washed with the Holy Spirit," or those of her husband, as the handkerchief was bound about his head : " I hope my eyes shall see our Lord Jesus Christ in heaven ; I am ready ! I am ready ! " "Her family misfortunes," says Valentine, speaking of Mrs. Leisler, "surrounded her with sympathetic neighbors, 248 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE but she maintained a reserved and humble deportment, mix- ing but little with the world, and confining herself to her own domestic sphere." Tliat her troubles had endeared her to her children is well attested, across two centuries of time, by so prosaic an evidence as the time-stained records in the New York Register's office, wherein, on the 19th of July, 1699, Jacob Leisler, the younger, appoints as his 'attorney- in-fact, "his dear and affectionate mother, Elsie Leisler, widdow." ^ The Loockermans' homestead upon the present Hanover Square had passed out of the hands of that family some years before the struggle between the Leislerian and the anti- Leislerian factions took place. Although somewhat outside of the plan of our survey, it may be of some interest to follow the subsequent history of this property for a short period. What remained of it, — for several parcels had been previ- ously sold off from time to time — came, within a short time after the death, in 1677 or 1678, of Marritje, the widow of Govert Loockermans, into the hands of one John Robinson, who purchased the family residence. This man was a mer- chant of New York, who was interested in the export of flour, and who, at the time he acquired the Loockermans' homestead, was engaged in the construction of a flour-mill upon the small stream known as the Sawkill, which emptied into the East River about at the foot of the present Seventy- fourth Street, along which stream he had a farm of nearly forty acres carved out of the forest.^ There he became in 1 See Liber XXII. of Conveyances, page 323. " Mr. D. T. Valentine, having read in tlip "Journal " of Rev. Charles Woolley, who visited New York abont 1679, an account of a bear having been " treed " in or near an orchard belonging to John Robinson (with whom Woolley was connected either by relationship or by business interests), — and apparently not having ob- served that John Robinson's farm lay in the midst of the then unbroken forest along the East River shore, where the presence of a bear at that time was no great marvel, — has calmly proceeded in some of his historical writings to transfer the bear hunt to the immediate vicinity of the house and sm.all parcel of land belonging to Robinson near the present Hanover Square. Mr. Valentine has not only conducted his bear through three or four miles of open farming country into the heart of a good-sized town, and led the animal over the town ditch and WILLIAM COX 249 some way connected in business dealings with William Cox to whom on February 12, 1684, he sold a half-interest in his mill and farm. William Cox was in some respects a singular character, about whose history not very much is known. He seems to have been a young man with considerable means, who had ap- parently been in New York for some little time prior to 1683, for in that year he was an alderman of the city. With him, in the city, resided his mother, whom he, as well as she herself, calls by the curious appellation of " Alice Cox, alias Bono." ^ As to his business, he called himself sometimes a merchant, and at other times a " bolter," from his milling operations. In 1685, William Cox married a young woman who was destined to figure more prominently in the affairs of the day than she could have desired. She was Sarah, the daughter of Captain Thomas Bradley, who with her father and her young brothers Samuel and Henry had come over from England and taken up their residence in New York. She is said to have been handsome and dashing, but was rather illiterate, for in various documents executed by her in her earlier years she makes her mark in the signature, — though not so in after years. On the 21st of January, 1688 (N. S.), Wilham Cox bought from John Robinson his house and ground previously spoken of upon the present Hanover Square, being the former Loock- ermans' homestead ; Cox himself may never have resided in this house, for in about a year from this time we find him purchasing another house upon the north side of Wall Street, which street was then beginning to be built up with a better palisades into a non-existent orcharfl, but, what is worse, lie has afforded an opportunity to some of the writers who have followed him, for some very pain- fully elaborated attempts at witticisms respecting Mr. Valentine's bear and the " bears " of the supposed neighboring Wall Street. 1 By the will of this lady, bearing date June 13, 1694, she bequeaths to her " dearly beloved brother, Mr. Robert Blackburnc, dry-fish monger in London," the sum of .£100. The rest of her estate she gives to John Theobalds, one of her executors, " to dispose of tlie same to his children, or to whomsoever he pleaseth." (Sec Will, N, Y. Surrogate's office.) 250 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE class of houses than had previously been found there, and in this latter dwelling he unquestionably resided during the short remainder of his life. It was in the summer of the year 1689 that the community was in a ferment over the action of Jacob Leisler and his party in seizing upon the government of the colony; Wil- liam Cox became a prominent supporter of Leisler, was one of the so-called " Committee of Safety " of the Leisler- ians, and lost his life about August, 1689, while engaged upon the business of his chief. The account of this aiTair is given with considerable flippancy by John Tuder, Cox's political enemy (afterwards recorder of the city), in a letter, dated August — , 1689, to Captain Nicholson, the ousted Lieutenant- Governor : — " Mr. Cox, to show his fine deaths, undertooke to gee to Amboy to proclaime the King, who coming whome againe, was fairely drowned, which accident startled our commanders here very much : there is a good rich widdow left. The manner of his being drowned was comeing on board in a cannow from Capt" Cornelis' Point at Staten Islands, goeing into the boate, slipt downe be- twixt the cannow and the boate, the water not being above his chinn, but very muddy, stuck fast in, and striving to get out, bobbing his head under, receaved to much water in. They brought him ashore with life in him, but all would not fetch him againe." The " good rich widdow " did not remain a widow long, for in a very short time she married John Oort, who is some- times spoken of as a merchant, and at others as a ship cap- tain, but his married life was of sliort duration. The fact is, that among this little coterie of English merchants and cap- tains and their famihes, events succeeded one another with bewildering rapidity. On the 15th of July, 1689, William Cox, then apparently in full healtli and vigor, executed his last will and testament, and on the 9th of August following, after the unfortunate occurrence whereby he had " receaved to much water in," his will was admitted to probate. By WILLIAM COX'S WILL 251 the I5th of May, 1691, Sarah Oort had about finished her mourning for both her deceased husbands, for upon that day she took out letters of administration upon the estate of the late John Oort; while upon the next day, the 16th of May, a license was issued, under the forms of the colonial law, for her marriage to Captain William Kidd. The newly married couple resided for several years in the house which Mrs. Kidd's first husband, William Cox, had purchased, upon the present Pearl Street. This house had passed to Cox's widow by virtue of a very curious provision in the mil of her husband. In the first part of this document Cox appears to have designed the house in question for his wife's brother : " I give to Samuel Bradley, my brother-in- law, my other house, which I bought of Mr. John Robinson, or this house which I now live in,^ my wife taking her first choice, and God sending my brother-in-law an heyre, that he call his name Cox Bradley " : later the testator remembers a moral obligation which he considers himself under, and con- tinues : " My desire is that this house where I now dwell in shall be for my brother Samuel and his heyres as above expressed, by reason of fulfilling an oath formerly solemnly sworne to my mother, she forcing me to passion, in fulfilling whereof I desire that tJiere may be no contention after my decease, concerning ye said house." After making several bequests to his mother, and to others. Cox left the remainder, being a considerable estate, to his wife Sarah, — the goods in his store were alone inventoried at 1900?., — so that the stories about her later husband, Captain William Kidd, be- ing a needy adventurer, when he started out upon his fatal voyage in the " Adventure " galley, five years later, are quite false. The tendency of modern historical criticism — at any rate among American writers — is not to regard William Kidd as the Raw-Head-and-Bloody-Bones which he was once popularly considered, but to look upon him as having been to a consider- 1 Upon the north siile of Wall Street. 252 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE able extent a vicarious sacrifice to save the reputation of men occupying a great deal liigher station than himself. If, at the present day, the President of the United States, together with the Secretary of State, and three or four more members of the Cabinet and governors of States or Territories, should agree, in private conference, that inasmuch as thefts, highway robberies, and train robberies, kidnapping, and other crimes of violence had increased to an intolerable degree within the territories of the United States, but that on account of the oppressive taxation necessary to support the military operations of the country in various quarters of the globe, no further demands ought to be made or could safely be made upon the heavily burdened people ; and should there- upon form an association — each one contributing a certain amount of money to it — for the purpose of equipping a pri- vate armed force to arrest or to destroy the outlaws, and stipu- lating that each one of the association should receive a certain proportion of the money and effects to be taken from such outlaws ; if in addition to this, it should be agreed that the leader of this force, as well as the men under his command, were themselves to receive no compensation for their services except a further proportion of the effects of the alleged law- breakers, — if all this were to be done, it is very certain that a general chorus of animadversion would be raised, not only by the opposite political party in this country, but by all the civilized nations of the earth. This, however, is substantially what was done in England in the year 1695. In the course of the wars between France and England, piracy had greatly increased upon the seas, much to the disturbance of the English, who looked upon the crime in an altogether different light when it was carried on against their commerce than when it was maintained (largely by themselves) against the Spanish. William III. was particu- larly anxious to have the pirates suppressed, and as they were supposed to have a good deal of support in the American colonies, and especially in New York, the king had selected Richard Coote, Earl of Bellamont, as Governor of New York, BELLAMONT'S SCHEME 253 to supplant Colonel Benjamin Fletcher, and had given him special instructions to operate against the pirates. It now became a question how these operations against the pirates should be carried on : the government, deeply involved in the war with France, could spare neither ships, men, nor money ; but the Earl of Bellamont, in conjunction with Robert Livingston of New York (who is said to have been the origina- tor of the scheme), formed a plan for sending out a private expedition, under warrant from the English government. For the commander of this expedition, Bellamont and Living- ston fixed upon Captain William Kidd, who had now been living for about four years in the house at the present Hanover Square in New York. Kidd, who is said to have been a native of Greenock, at the mouth of the Clyde River in Scotland (then a mere village of fishers), was about thirty-five years of age at this time, a careful and experienced sea-captain of good repute, who as early as 1691 had served with dis- tinction against the French. Kidd was also familiar with the haunts of the pirates, and had sanguine views about the ease with which he could capture them. Having submitted their plan to the king, and received his sanction, articles of agreement were drawn up on the 10th of October, 1695, between the Earl of Bellamont and Kidd, whereby Bellamont undertakes to procure, from the king or from the commissioners of Admiralt}^ commissions to Kidd to fight the king's enemies or pirates, and also agi-ees to furnish four-fifths of the cost of buying and fitting up a proper ves- sel, the remaining fifth being furnished by Kidd and Living- ston together. Kidd on his part agrees to take such prizes as he can, and forthwith to make the best of his way to Boston to condemn them, " without touching at any other place whatso- ever," and he further agrees to enlist his men, " no purchase, no pay," — that is, they must look to their prizes for compen- sation. Both Kidd and Livingston entered into bonds for a considerable amount to secure their part of the undertaking. As for the Earl of Bellamont' s share, it was in part made up, in sums of about .£1000 each, by the following distinguished 254 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE partners : Lord John Somers, Keeper of the Great Seal ; the Earl of Romney, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland; the Earl of Shrewsbury, Secretary of State; and the Earl of Or- ford, First Lord of the Admiralty. One tenth part was to be reserved for the king, in token of his approval of the scheme. Kidd was thereupon granted two commissions, one bearing date December 10, 1695, an ordinary commission to act against the French ; the other an extraordinary one dated 26th January, 1695-96, to apprehend and seize all pirates. The dangers of admitting a large body of sailors into this sort of speculation, by making their pay contingent upon their success, were fully realized in England. Sir Edmund Harrison, who was one of the contributors to the enterprise, took care, — as we are informed in the pamphlet upon the Kidd Case, known as " Letters from a Person of Quality," etc. (avowedly written in the interest of the Earl of Bellamont) — that every one of Kidd's officers, and almost all the seamen, had settled families in England : " true it is, this last care was in a great degree rendered ineffectual, for most of his crew were pressed into the King's service before he got out of the river." Of course it is incredible that Kidd should not have complained of this interference with his commission ; the act was evidently notorious ; the intervention of the king or of the First Lord of the Admiralty, both of whom were partners with Kidd in tliis enterprise, would undoubtedly have been sufficient to restore these picked men at once ; and Kidd lingered at Plymouth until April, 1696, and yet he was per- mitted by those in power to depart on such an errand as his with hardly any men, and without the prospect of getting any except the unstable characters whom he might succeed in alluring into his service in the colonies. He sailed finally for New York with liis ship, the now notorious " Adventure " galley, and at that port he filled out his complement of men. Of their character the English government was fully informed by a letter from Governor Benjamin Fletcher to the Lords CAPTAIN KIDD AND HIS CREW 255 of Trade in England : ^ " One Captain Kidd lately arrived here, and produced a commission under the Great Seal of England, for suppressing of piracy. When he was here many flocked to him from all parts, men of desperate fortunes and necessitous, in expectation of getting vast treasure. . . . It is generally believed here they will have money joer /as ant nefas ; that if he miss of the design intended, for which he has commission, 't will not be in Kidd's power to govern such a hord of men, under no pay." In July, 1696, Kidd sailed from New York for the Straits of Madagascar. From this time, for more than a year and a half, we have no accurate knowledge of what took place on the " Adventure " galley. Kidd's own full statement was never allowed to be made public, but even from the one-sided testi- mony produced upon the so-called " trials " of the indictments against him (taken in conjunction with a few known facts), there is the strongest evidence that what had been anticipated actually occurred. The partners in this enterprise had been too sanguine. Such pirates as were upon the seas kept care- fully out of Kidd's way, and French prizes were few and far between. The lawless characters composing the greater part of the crew of the " Adventure " became enraged at their ill-luck, and at the failure of Kidd's promises to them ; they mutinied about the month of September, 1697, and from that time for a period of about four months, Kidd appears to have been prac- tically a prisoner in the hands of his rebellious crew. Their ascendancy over him was greatly enhanced soon after the above-named date by an unfortunate occurrence, whereby Kidd, in a fit of passion, struck with a water bucket one of the mutineers named William jMoore in such a manner that he died within a day or two from the effects of the blow.^ ^ The letter will be found in 4 Col. Doc, p. 275. It is not dated, but must have been written in the latter part of 1696. ^ Kidd, as is well known, was tried at the Old Bailey upon an indictment for the killing of this man. The trial took place at the same time with the trials of the indictments for piracy. The witnesses for the government were the same two 256 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE Within the period of four months, above mentioned, five or six vessels are stated in the indictments and in the testimony taken thereupon to have been captured by the " Adventure " galley. Most of these were Arabian or " Moorish " coasters of the most insignificant size and value, one of them, of fifty tons' burden, yielded a little coffee and sugar, and " some sugar candy ; " out of another, some coffee, pepper, and myrrh, worth persons made use of as State's evidence in the piracy trials, — the mutineer, Joseph Palmer, and the drunken surgeon, Robert Bradinham. Kidd had no witnesses for his defence except those members of his crew who had been brought with him under arrest, from America to England. In the piracy trials their mouths were closed in his behalf, for they were jointly indicted with him ; but in the murder trial, he was allowed to call them as witnesses. Un- fortunately, however, they had seen little or notliing of the occurrence. Kidd, it must be remembered, under the criminal procedure of that period, was not allowed to testify in his own behalf. The respective trials for murder and for piracy throw much light one upon another. It appears that about a fortnight before the killing of William Moore, Kidd had fallen in with a vessel called the " Loyal Captain," which he had allowed to proceed upon its way, to the great dissatisfaction of his crew; the sailor, Moore, it seems, had been charged with exciting discontent among the others, by going about among them, saying that if the captain would have listened to him, he could have taken the vessel, with- out incurring any liability. Tlie story of the killing, as given by the witness Palmer, was this : " Captain Kidd came and walked on the deck, and walks by this Moore, and when he came to him says, ' wliich way could you have put me in a way to take the ship and been clear ? ' ' Sir,' says William Moore, ' I never spoke such a word, nor ever thought such a thing,' upon which Captain Kidd called him a ' lousy dog,' and says William Moore, ' If I am a lousy dog, you have made me so ; you have brought me to ruin and many more ' — upon his saying this, says Captain Kidd, ' Have I ruined you, ye dog ? ' and took a bucket bound with iron hoops, and struck him on the right side of the head, of which he died the next day." Macaulay, writing up the glories of his idolized William III. and of Lord John Somers, tells of the " agony of remorse " with which William Moore uttered the above remark. If one can shake off the charm of the great historian's pictur- esque .style long enough to examine critically his remarkably inaccurate account of this affair, he will be apt to conclude, — inasmuch as the occurrence took place be- fore the alleged piratical depredations of the " Adventure " galley, — that William Moore's remark to his captain was made mucli more in a spirit of surly reproach for having been induced by him to enter an unremunerative service than in any "agony of remorse." As for William Moore himself, he appears to have been previously in trouble, and under arrest in New York upon sever.al occasions, for difficulties between himself and his superior officers. (Vide Colonial MSS., N. Y. State Library.) KIDD'S ALLEGED PIRACIES 257 about flOO, were taken on board the "Adventure," and the vessel then was allowed to proceed upon its way ; this was the earhest act of piracy charged, and as it is hardly credible that these trifles formed the whole cargo of the " Moorish " vessel, they may have been nothing more than the private property of a Portuguese who was transferred at this time to the " Adventure," to act as an interpreter ; no cross-exam- ination by counsel, upon the trials, was permitted to throw any light upon these matters. As to the other captures, one or two of them were made by boats' crews, and the whole series of them seems to be much more the work of a lawless gang of ruffians, ready to take anything that came in their way, than that of an experienced sea-captain, who was not laboring under any suspicions of lunacy. On the 27th of November, 1697, the " Adventure " captured off Surat a Moorish ship, which, according to Kidd's claim, was sailing under French papers. This of course he was justified in seizing under his commission, and it then became his duty to have taken her at once to Boston, in pursuance of his agreement with Bellamont, to have her condemned in a prize court. The vessel and her cargo, however, were of but little value, and the crew, as was further claimed by Kidd (and vdth great probability of truth), refused to waste so many months on a voyage from the Persian Gulf to Boston ; the few articles of value of this vessel's cargo seem to have been taken possession of by the " Adventure's " men, and some of them carried on shore and sold at dif- ferent points along the coast. On the 30th of Januaiy, 1698 (N. S.), however, the " Ad- venture " captured a prize of a different character. This was the famous " Quedagh " or " Quiddah " merchant. She was sailing with French papers, as was claimed by Kidd, and her cargo, of which a large part belonged to some Armenian mer- chants, was a very valuable one. Kidd's crew were no more disposed to sail to Boston with this prize than with the others. They had already done enough in the way of mutiny and piracy to bring them into the most imminent danger of 17 258 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE their lives, but they had now in their liands enough to com- pensate them for the risks they had run. A goodly portion of the valuable cargo of the " Quedagh " was sold, in what manner we have no definite information, at various points upon the coasts of India ; the " Adventure's " crew divided among themselves a large amount of money obtained in this way ; and then the greater portion of the men, being nearly a hundred in number, abandoned the vessels, went on shore with their gains, and dispersed themselves in such directions as they thought best. There remained now about fifty men with Kidd, and with these he started to return to the American colonies. The " Adventure " having become leaky, it was abandoned, and Kidd and his crew sailed in the " Quedagh " mercliant, and seem to have arrived in the West Indies in the latter part of 1698, or in the early part of 1699. In the mean time, reports of the work of the " Adventure " galley reached England, and excited great consternation among Captain Kidd's distinguished partners. Political ani- mosities ran high at this time, and the party opposed to the government eagerly seized upon this piece of scandal for political capital. Vigorous measures of some kind had to be taken by the administration, and accordingly, upon the 16th of December, 1698, before any definite or trustworthy account of Captain Kidd's doings could possibly have reached England, a proclamation was issued by the English govern- ment, offering a pardon to all persons guilty of piratical practices, who should surrender themselves before a certain date to commissioners named for that purpose. From the benefit of this proclamation, Captain William Kidd was ex- pressly excluded. It is uncertain whether or not Kidd first heard of this proclamation in the West Indies, though it seems quite probable that he did. Under any circumstances, and whether guilty or innocent, he had to anticipate much trouble ahead for himself ; and it was probably from this reason that he seems to have adopted an expedient the practical effect of KIDD RETURNS TO NEW YORK 259 wliicli has been to obscure both his own conduct and that of the high-pkced parties with whom he was associated, but which — though ill-judged — is not incompatible with liis own innocence of the main charges against him. This expedient was to retain, or to give the impression that he retained, upon his surrender of himself to the government, a sufficient security under his own control, to enable him to force the government to grant him the immunity from prose- cution or the pardon, to wliich he claimed to be entitled. Accordingly, leaving his vessel and what remained of her cargo (and this was of great value, according to his asser- tion) under the care of a small guard at some undisclosed place in the West Indies, Kidd with forty or fifty of his men made their appearance in the early part of 1699, in a small coasting vessel in the vicinity of New York, and after de- positing certain valuables upon Gardiner's Island, and at one or two other points, the captain opened communications, through Mr. James Emott, a New York attorney, with Lord Bellamont, who was then at Boston, he being Governor of Massachusetts as well as of New York. Kidd's proposi- tion was a simple one. He offered to turn over to Lord Bellamont and to the government the " Quedagh " merchant and such part of the cargo and of the proceeds thereof as remained in his hands, upon receiving a pardon and indem- nity against loss on the bond which he had given. With his communication to Lord Bellamont, Kidd sent, by his agent Emott, as announced by Bellamont to the Council in Boston, " two French papers, found in two ships taken by said Kidds Co., by violence against his will." There is little question that at this stage of the affair, Bel- lamont accepted Kidd's version of the transactions which had taken place, and wished to accept his proposition. " I make no doubt," he writes to Kidd, " but to obtain the king's par- don for you and those few men you have left, who, I under- stand, have been faithful to you and refused, as well as you, to dishonor the commission you had from England." After- wards, when it became evident that Kidd was to be sacrificed 260 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE to the interests of the Whig administration, it suited Bella- mont to proclaim that his letter to Kidd had been merely a lying one. In a letter from New York to Secretary Vernon, dated December 6, 1700, he says: "When I writ that letter to Kid by Burgesse, I had an account that he was certainly turned pyrate ; and then I could not be blamed to have a just indignation against him, and to try by all means to get him into my hands, and 't is plain menacing him had not been the way to invite him hither, but rather wheedling, and that way I took, and after that manner I got him at last into Bos- ton, when I secured him." Whatever Bellamont's motives may have been, and under whatever orders, if any, from the English government he may have been acting, it is certain that Kidd, soon after his land- ing at Boston, was placed under arrest and sent to England. There he remained in prison, without being brought to trial, from the summer of 1699 till May, 1701, — nearly two years. What the reasons were for this delay, we do not know ; they may have arisen from an attempt to extort from Kidd his secret as to the alleged wealth he had concealed ; or there may have been compunction about carrying out the punish- ment of Kidd ; or perhaps the opposition party did not allow the government a free hand ; in the absence of authentic in- formation, we can only surmise. Just at this point, the criminality of Lord Somers and of his associates — not excepting the king — commences. It was of course evident that if Kidd was not to be punished, there was scarcely a possibility that any of his mutinous crew, by that time scattered all over the globe, would ever be brought to punishment, and the scandal of the " Adventure's " doings would remain, as a perpetual reproach to the Whig adminis- tration, and a menace to the not too firmly established Prot- estant succession to the English throne. Two courses were open to the administration : one was to examine carefully and impartially Kidd's story, and if it were found to be true to acquit him, and they themselves to assume the opprobrium of their ill-advised and indecent TRIAL OF CAPTAIN KIDD 261 (though not criminal) speculative enterprise; the other course was to convict Kidd, and then to pose as the victims of a wicked deceiver, — they seem to have chosen the latter course. Few persons can read the accounts of the trials of Kidd and of his associates at the Old Bailey, on the 8th and 9bh of May, 1701, without a feeling of pain and disgust. The trial of Kidd for the murder of William Moore ; and the trials of Kidd and of half a score of the seamen of his crew on six separate indictments for piracy, — all took place within those two days. In a matter of such sujjreme importance, no counsel was allowed to the prisoners, although Doctor (in the Civil Law) Oldish and Mr. Proctor Lemmon stood ready in the court room to appear for Kidd. It had been only a short time before when the young Lord Ashley, rising in Parliament to speak in favor of the bill then pending, which allowed coun- sel to persons tried upon charges of treason, lost his control and was for a short time unable to proceed ; then recover- ing himself, he said : " How can I, Sir, produce a stronger argument in favour of this bill than my own failure ? My fortune, my character, my life, are not at stake. I am speak- ing to an audience whose kindness might well inspire me with courage. And yet, from mere nervousness, from mere want of practice in addressing large assemblies, I have lost my recollection. I am unable to go on with my argument. How helpless then must be a poor man, who, never having opened his lips in public, is called upon to reply without a moment's preparation to the ablest and most experienced ad- vocates in the kingdom, and whose faculties are paralysed by the thought that, if he fails to convince his hearers, he will in a few hours die on the gallows, and leave beggary and in- famy to those who are dearest to him ! " Lord Ashley's speech had created a great impression in England at the time, but it does not seem to have made much impression upon the judges of the court which tried William Kidd. They were less loud-mouthed, it is true, than their predecessor, the bawling monster, Jeffreys, whose memory 262 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE was still fresh and hideous among men, but otherwise his mantle seems to have fallen upon worthy shoulders. They give the impression that they were men appointed to perform an unsavory piece of work, and who had made up their minds to go stoutly through with it. Even the understrapper, clerk of the arraignments, was permitted to take a hand in the brow- beating. A specimen extract or two from the court proceed- ings may be not without interest.^ The prisoners had been brought into court to plead to the indictments : " Cl. Arr. William Kidd, hold up thy hand. KiDD. May it please your Lordships, I desire you to permit me to have counsel. Recorder (Sir Salathiel Lovell). What would you have counsel for? Kidd. My Lord, I have some matter of law relating to the indictment, and I desire I may have counsel to speak to it. Dr. Oxenden. What matter of law can you have? Cl. Arr. How does he know what it is he is charged with? I have not told him. Recorder. Mr. Kidd, do you know what you mean by matter of law? Kidd. I know what I mean. I desire to put off my trial as long as I can, till I can get my evidence ready. Rec. Mr. Kidd, you had best mention the matter of law you would insist on. Kidd. I desire your Lordship's favor. I desire Dr. Oldish and Mr. Lemmon may be heard as to my case. Cl. Arr. What can he have counsel for before he has pleaded? . . . Kidd. I beg your Lordships' patience till I can procure my papers. I had a couple of French passes, which I must make use of in order to my justification. ^ Kidd was undoubtedly, as he mournfully exclaimed in the court-room, " without money and without friends." The aim of the Tory opposition party was to have him convicted of piracy, and to fasten guilty knowledge of his pir- atical designs upon the government, — not at all to have him acquitted. KIDD DEPRIVED OF COUNSEL 263 Rec. That is not matter of law. You have had long notice of your trial, and might have prepared for it. How long have you had notice of your trial? KiDD. A matter of a fortnight. Dk. Oxenden. Can you tell the names of any persons you would make use of in your defence ? KiDD. I sent for them, but I could not have them. Dr. O. Where were they then ? KiDD. I brought them to my Lord Bellamont in New England. Rec. What were their names? You cannot tell without book?^ Mr. Kidd, the court sees no reason to put off your trial, therefore you must plead. . . . Kidd. I beg your Lordships I may have counsel admitted, and that my trial may be put off. I am not really prepared for it. Rec. Nor never will be, if you can help it. Kidd. If your Lordships permit those papers to be read, they will justify me. I desire my counsel may be heard. . . . Mr. Coniers.2 We admit of no counsel for him. . . . Mr. Lemmon. He ought to have his papers delivered to him, because they are very material for his defence ; he has endeavored to have them, but could not get them. Mr. Contcers. You are not to appear for any one till he pleads, and that the court assigns you for his counsel." So the trials were hurried on then and there. The wit- nesses for the prosecution, two doubtful characters of the crew, one of whom, as accidentally appeared, had previously stated that Captain Kidd would be able to justify himself in everything he had done, went through their parrot-like stories on each of the several indictments. Hearsay evidence, opinions, and assertions as to Kidd's motives and intentions 1 Meaning evidently his lists of the crew. 2 For the government. It is well to remember that in the case of Captain Cuddiford, who was accused of piracy and tried at about this time, the court allowed him counsel without hesitation. In Kidd's case, however, it is quite probable that the officers of the government saw very clearly that counsel for Kidd would be likely to ask many questions that would prove embarrassing for the eminent partners of the latter. 264 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE were all admitted in evidence without question, — till Kidd asked one of the witnesses in despair : " Mr. Bradinham, are you not promised your life to swear away mine?" The cross-examinations of these witnesses by the prisoners on trial for their lives, ignorant men, most of whom prob- ably had never been in a court-room before, would have been ludicrous, had it not been so pitiable. The prisoners were not allowed to testify in tlieir own behalf, nor for each other, and had really nothing to offer which could be looked at in the light of a defence. ^ They were found guilty, almost as a matter of course, and then, when asked by the court what they had to say, the following remarkable colloquy took place, between Kidd and Chief Baron Ward, who pro- nounced the sentence : "Kidd. I have many papers for my defence, if I could have had them. L. C. B. Ward. What papers were they? Kidd. My French passes. L. C. B. Ward. Where are they? Kidd. My Lord Bellamont had them. L. C. B. Ward. If you had had the French papers, you should have condemned the ships. Kidd. I could not because of the mutiny in my ship. L. C. B. Ward. If you h'ad anything of disability upon you to make your defence, you should have objected to it at the heg inning of your trial. What you mean by it now I cannot tell." So the "trial" ended. Captain Kidd may possibly have been a pirate, but it was not proved by these proceedings ; they may perhaps be the subject of future revision by a higher tribunal, — in the words of Rudyard Kipling : — " When the last grim joke is entered In the big, black Book of Jobs." 1 Kidd had three or four naval officers present to testify to his character. All spoke well of him, hut this of course had little or no bearing upon the cases on trial. As for the killing of the sailor Moore, it may have amounted to a grade of manslaughter; but if the mutinous disposition of the men existed, as there is every reason to believe it did, the matter would not have been taken notice of under simil.ar circumstances on any other vessel in the service. EXECUTION OF CAPTAIN KIDD 265 Three days after the trial, upon the 12th of iMa}-, 1701, William Kidd was hanged at Execution Dock, Wapping.^ His confiscated effects, supposed to have been mainly such portions of the proceeds of the cargo of the " Quedagh " mer- chant as the English government could get into its posses- sion, and amounting to something over £6400, were added to the endowment of Greenwich Hospital, the unfinished towers and quadrangle of which were probably some of the last objects which Captain Kidd beheld as he looked from the scaffold upon the muddy shores of Wapping, over the low cottages of Rotherhithe, and down the long Limehouse Reach of the Thames, crowded with vessels of all descriptions. There, within the walls of that world-renowned charity for seamen, the British Admiralty might, with merit, place a memorial tablet to William Kidd, as to one of the benefactors of the hospital, with the simple inscription, taken from a tomb in the great abbey, at the other end of the metropolis : " Qualis erat, iste dies indicabit." Kidd's imaginary exploits became the fruitful theme of sailors' yarns, and a lurid ballad, sung to the then popular Whig air of " Ye Jacobites by name give an ear, give an ear 1 " was long a favorite among them, its strains, sung in rather lively measure, being often heard over the water of a summer night: " I murdered William Moore As I sailed, as I sailed. I murdered William Moore As I sailed. I murdered William Moore, And I left him in his gore. Not many leagues from shore, As I sailed." 1 None of the members of Kidd's crew, who were tried and condemned to death with him, were ever executed, as far as we are informed. It was probably never designed that they should be. Statements have been made by certain writers, without giving their authority, that the members of Kidd's crew, who were tried with him were also executed, but the records of the trial, though men- tioning the carrying out of the sentence in Kidd's case are silent as to the crew. 266 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE Captain Kidd's widow married, in 1703, for her fourth hus- band, Christopher Rousby, a man of considerable political influence in the colony. Mrs. Kidd's property in New York was confirmed to her by the English government ; and she and her husband resided for a time in the old Bowery mansion of Director Stuyvesant, whose farm they had leased. Mrs. Sarah Rousby attained a great age, much of the latter part of her life being spent in New Jersey. Her will, bearing date November 1, 1732, was proved some twelve years later, at which time she seems to have left four children surviving her. CHAPTER XIX SERGEANT DANIEL LITSCHO AND HIS TAVERN. — ANDRIES JOCHEMSEN. — THE " OUTHOEK:' — WALL STREET AND THE PALISADES OF 1653. — TYMEN J AN SEN, THE SHIP CARPENTER, AND HIS HOUSE I bade her on her license look, " Oh Sir," quoth she, "ye are mistook, I have a lesson without book, Most perfect ; If I my license should observe, And not in any point to swerve, Both I and mine, alas ! should starve. Not surfeit." Ballad of " Robin Conscience." NEXT in an easterly direction beyond the grounds of Govert Loockermans, stood, upon the Shore Road, in the year 1655, a building which appears to have been, as early as 1645, in the possession of Dirck Volckertsen, one of the oldest settlers ; was subsequently for a time the prop- erty and probably the residence of Govert Loockermans, and then became the tavern of Sergeant Daniel Litscho. As the records of Litscho's transactions relating to his property at this place are very imperfect, we have to glean our informa- tion largely from detached references and other scraps of in- formation, supplying something from conjecture. Daniel Litscho or Letscho is supposed to have been a native of the town of Cosslin in Pomerania, near the coast of the Baltic Sea.i He reached New Amsterdam at an early date, though 1 The name "Leko," with some slight variations, forms the appellation of several villages near this town, and the sergeant's name may have been derived from one of them, — not an unusual case. 268 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE the year is not known. Pomerania suffered severely, about the year 1630, in the Thirty Years' War, as has already been noticed (ante^ page 225), and it is not unlikely that Litscho may have quitted his country at that time. At any rate, this house upon the Shore Road was in his occupation before 1648, in which year he was one of the twelve licensed tavern- keepers of New Amsterdam. His tavern seems to have been a good-sized building, for it is occasionally spoken of as " the great house," though this is perhaps only in comparison with a smaller one afterwards built to the east of it. It had at least a quarter of an acre of ground attached to it, with a frontage upon the river road of some seventy-five feet, and back of its garden were a few apple-trees,^ which were called its "orchard," and which about the time of our survey had been the subject of great depredations by the vagrant goats of the town, which were permitted to feed on the vacant " out- hoek " of the Jan Damen farm, extending from this point to the city " Wall," upon the north line of the present Wall Street. The tavern seems to have stood a little distance back from the line of the street, and its site is in good part occu- pied by the present building No. 125 Pearl Street.^ Sergeant Daniel Litscho no longer kept tavern here at the time of our survey in 1655. In the spring of 1651, he leased the house to one Andries Jochemsen, who kept a tavern or ale-house here for many years, and afterwards acquired the property. Litscho, in a short time after the last-mentioned date, appears to have exchanged his house and land at this place with Claes Hendricks, a carpenter, for a somewhat larger parcel of land owned by the latter, just outside of the ^ In a deed, supposed to be of this property, from Dirck Volckertsen to Govert Aersen, in 1645, the vendor of the property reserves the right "to remove six apple-trees." ^ The property seems in part to liave belonged originally to the tract granted to Tymen Jansen, and subsequently to have been controlled by Govert Loocker mans. In 1G44, this portion of the Tymen Jansen patent was apparently re- granted by the Director and Council to Jan Damen. Dirck Volckertsen was the husband of Damen's step-daughter, and, probably enough, had acquired an en- largement of his ground from his father-in-law. JOCHEMSEN'S TAVERN 269 gate of the palisades at Wall Street. There the sergeant dwelt, and probably kept a tavern, at the time of our survey, and for a short period thereafter, as will be noticed in proper order. As for Andries Jochemsen, he had the usual troubles of a tavern-keeper with the Dutch authorities. He could not resist the temptation of occasionally tapping on Sundays dur- ing the hours of preaching, when some of the idle negroes or other good-for-nothing vagabonds of the town found their way into his tavern. Nor was he always particular to turn away his customers at nine o'clock in the evening, as the ordinances required. The schout often had to pay disciplinary visits to Jochemsen's tavern, and these were greatly resented by the tavern-keeper's huysvrouw, insomuch that the officer reported to the burgomasters upon one occasion that after having noted down Andries " for the fine," the wife of the latter " called out after him : ' Schout, I have something to say to thee ; hast thou any soul or conscience ? Dost thou expect to go to heaven?' — and more such like words, so that if he were as willing as she, there would have been a street uproar." These pointed inquiries, so disconcerting to a New York official, even at that early day, were however denied by An- dries. His recollection was that the remark made to the schout was merel}^ : " Thou hast a conscience, which is not worth much," or, " which is somewhat large." Claes Hendricksen, the carpenter, seems to have built a house upon the easterly side of the plot of ground he had ac- quired from Sergeant Litscho, and an earlier building doubt- less stood there also, for in subsequent transfers of the premises they are said to contain two houses, one of which was a small one and appears to have been afterwards removed. About the time of our survey these buildings passed through several hands in quick succession, possibly under the fore- closure of a mortgage upon them. They were held in 1655 by Arent van Curler, and do not seem to have been regularly tenanted. Finally they were sold in 1659 to one Jan Lour- ensen, who resided here for many years. At the period of our 270 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE survey, these were the hxst houses along the shore within the town palisades at Wall Street, but within a year or two later, Sergeant Litscho, whose house outside the gate had been con- demned by the authorities as standing too near the fortifica- tions, returned to this spot, and built upon some land he had recently purchased upon the Damen " outhoek." His house joined immediately to that of Jan Lourensen upon the east, and here he, and after liis death in 1662 his wife Anneken, kept a tavern for a long period, she being well known in the later English times as " Mother Daniels." ^ This tavern was a prominent one, and derived not a little importance from the fact that it was a sort of fire station for the eastern part of the town, — a dozen fire-buckets having been ordered in 1659 to be kept here for use in cases of emergency. This, however, was after the time of our survey. In 1655, all the space from Arent van Curler's houses (or from about the present building, No. 129 Pearl Street) to the earthwork and palisades, which ran along the northerly line of the present Wall Street, — being a distance of about two hundred and seventy-five feet, — was waste ground, where goats browsed, and where dandelions starred the sod in spring, as they do now in many a similar neglected spot in the outskirts of the city. The land lying along the river road, or the modern Pearl Street, and extending from a short distance east of the present Hanover Street to Maiden Lane, had been granted by the 1 Under the Dutch system of names, by which her own appeared as Anneke Danielse. This lady, lii^e many of her neighbors, had seen a good deal of the world. She was the daughter of one Claas Croesens, and had in her earlier life married Jan Janseu Swaartveger, wlio is supposed to liave been in the military service of the West India Company. She accompanied her husband to Brazil, and there, at the Castle of Rio Grande, her son, Harmanus Janseu, was born, about the year 1643. Her first husband iiaving died, we find her about the year 1647 married to Sergeant Litscho, by whom she had one daughter, Anna. Her son Harmanus is said in 1662 to be living in New Amsterdam, engaged in the study of medicine and surgery. Her daughter Anna married William Bartre or Pear- tree, sometimes spoken of as " Colonel," and Frances, the daughter of the latter, who married William Smith, a merchant, was the mother of William Peartree Smith, prominent in the Colonial days of New York. THE OUTHOEK 271 Director and Council, at a very early date, to two or three in- dividuals, who had built upon and otherwise improved their holdings. Among these proprietors was Tymen Jansen, master ship carpenter for the West India Company, who in 1643 re- ceived a grant for a parcel upon which he must have previ- ously resided for a number of years, and which seems to have stretched along the river road, about from the present No. 125 Pearl Street to what is now the rear of the Seaman's Savings Bank building at the northwest corner of Pearl and Wall streets, — a distance of about four hundred and fifty feet. In depth this plot of ground averaged almost two hundred and twenty-five feet, so that its area amounted to more than two acres. Tymen Jansen died in, or soon after, the year 1644 : previously, however, he appears to have sold, or to have agreed to sell to Jan Jansen Damen, whose farm adjoined him upon the west, the bulk of his holding, being almost two acres in area, and lying nearest the town ; it was separated from the reserved portion of his plot by a lane lying just north of the present Wall Street ; ^ the portion thus sold to Damen was situated somewhat southeast of Jan Damen's farm, which it touched at one corner, — scarcely more than enough to afford passage from one parcel of ground to the other. This was granted to Jan Damen, and from its shape and situation be- came known as the "outhoek " of his farm. When, in 1653, the palisades were constructed along what is now the northern line of Wall Street, this " outhoek " became entirely separated from the body of the farm ; and in the spring of the next year, 1 654, the heirs of Jan Damen ^ sold this parcel of ground for 1 This lane led into the ancient Schaape Weytie, or Sheep Pasture, and by varions turnings appears to have communicated with the Slyck Steegh, or Mill Lane. There are indications that it formed a very ancient road or perhaps wood path, in use before the road was laid out along the river-bank, and which perhaps ran still farther along the low slopes of the upland into the old lane forming the present Gold Street (with which it was in line), and so into Van Tienhoven's lane and out to the Second Common Pasture, or present City Hall Park. That por- tion of the lane more especially referred to in the text seems to have been swal- lowed up by the ditch constructed in 1653 on the north side of the town palisades. 2 Strictly speaking, the heirs of Jan Damen's deceased wife, Arientje. She had acquired the property from her liusband by survivorship, and upon her death, soon after his own, it passed to her children by a former husband. 272 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE " a thousand pieces of green plank," to Jacob Plodder, of Fort Orange, or Albany. Plodder appears to have bought the ground for speculative purposes ; and in the summer of 1656, after some delay in getting his deed for the premises, he sold a part of it, probably at auction, in six parcels, to as many dif- ferent individuals. These seem, in their turn, to have bought "for a rise," for, with the exception of Daniel Litscho, who built upon liis plot at the westerly end of the " outhoek," as previously mentioned, the rest of the purchasers appear to have allowed their lots to remain unimproved for a number of years. To the stroller, passing up Pearl Street, it is somewhat difficult to realize, as Wall Street with its hurrying, jostling throng, opens before him, that here, about two centuries and a half ago, little was to be seen except a rather forlorn earth- work of sods, four or five feet in height, above which showed a perhaps equal height of roughly hewn and pointed "pali- sades," formed of the trunks of small trees six inches or thereabouts in diameter. At the foot of the earthwork was an open space along which the burgher militia companies occasionally drilled, and sentries paced now and then at periods of alarm, but which at other times lay solitary and waste. This line of defence, occupying the northerly side of Wall Street, stretched (as originally laid out) straight across the island, from the East River to the North River, passing over the site of the present Trinity Church. On the further side, lay its trench, " four or five feet in depth, and ten or eleven broad, somewhat sloping," — using the not very precise lan- guage of the order of its construction. Tliis order of the Council bears date the 20th of April, 1653. The details of the construction of this line of defence, given by Mr. D. T. Valentine,^ evidently refer to merely preliminary and ten- tative plans under discussion by the Director and Council.^ 1 In Manual N. Y. Com. Council, 1862, p. 520. 2 One of these plans provided for a cnrtaiu of planks four inches thick, instead of the pali.sades, and these seem to have been afterwards added or substituted, THE PALISADES OP 1653 ^n The work was intended, of course, only as a defence against an attack by land from an enemy without artillery, — either from the Indians or from the New England colonists, with the latter of whom trouble was anticipated about this time. No mention is made in the original proceedings, of the con- struction of bastions along the line of defence, but in " The Duke's Plan," so called, of the town as it was in the year 1661, we find that five small "flat" bastions, of a semi-ellip- tical form, had by that time been constructed along the works. These merely projected far enough from the curtain, or main line, to allow a couple of guns to be mounted upon each of them ; they were, in all probability, constructed with- in a year or two after the original works, and their positions are quite closely defined. Proceeding from the east toward the North River, the first of these bastions was situated just about opposite the head of the present Hanover Street ; the r.econd was a few feet west of the present William Street, being located about at the spot where now stands the en- trance to the Bank of America ; the third occupied the south- west part of the Sub-Treasury Building, at the corner of Wall and Nassau streets ; the fourth was a few feet east of Broad- way, being nearly upon the site of the building No. 4 Wall Street ; and the fifth stood at the rear of the present Trinity Church. Through these defences, two narrow gates gave ac- cess to the town, — the so-called " Land Poort " at the present Broadway, and the " Water Poort " at the river road, or pres- ent Pearl Street. About the period of the surrender to the English, in 1664, several changes were made in the " fortifications ; " and the bastions, which had been somewhat too close together, were demolished, with the exception of the second and the fifth and to have been probably furnished upon contract by the heirs of the Damen farm from the " thousand pieces of green plank " for which they sold the " outhoek " to Jacob Flodder, in 1654, as previously stated in the text. That the palisades were originally used, is shown, however, by a report made to the Council in 1655 that " about 65 of the new palisades have been chopped down, and used for fire-wood," — some of the suburban residents evidently having possessed the same traits in the seventeenth century as at the present day. 18 274 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE of those above noted, — if, indeed, the fifth was not rather rebuilt at this time, at a point nearer Broadway than before. In 1673-74, at the time of the recapture of the town by the Dutch, Governor Colve effected considerable further changes in these works. A general clearance of buildings and ob- structions in their vicinity took place, in the course of which several interesting landmarks were demolished. That portion of the fortification west of Broadway was entirely rebuilt upon new lines, being turned to the south, towards the pres- ent Rector Street, in such a manner as to cover its exposed flank, in the direction of the North River; the site of the present Trinity Church was now left entirely outside of the works. The second bastion, above spoken of, near the present William Street, was now considerably enlarged, and a new one was constructed just east of Broadway: these received names, according to the custom of the Dutch, and were known as " HoUandia " and " Zeelandia." The gate at Broadway was closed, and a new one was constructed at the head of Broad Street, where it was commanded by both the bastions; the road thence turned along the trench, and in front of the westerly bastion into Broadway. A gate, or at least an opening, at Broadway seems to have been restored within a few years, in compliance with a public demand, but the gate at Broad Street appears to have remained in use till the final destruction of the works about the end of the seven- teenth century.^ An observer, standing at the narrow " Water Poort," look- ing northwards, in tlie year 1655, saw before him the ditch of the town " fortification ; " upon its south bank the line of palisades nine feet high, and upon its north bank the fence of the Damen farm, formed a vista extending straight up the hill, towards the North River. Over the ditch a rough bridge was probably thrown, at the gate, and through it ran a small rill collected from springs at the foot of the hillside pasture 1 111 1674 an order of council was made for tlie construction of "a little gate " at Smits Vly, for a foot passage. TYMEN JANSEN 275 known as the Claaver Weytie of the Damen farm. Over this streamlet, and upon the east side of the road or present Pearl Street, a score and more of years after the time of our survey, the butchers of the town ^ erected slaughter-houses, much as the poulterers of London, centuries ago, built their scalding- house over the somewhat similarly situated stream called the Wallbrook. These slaughter-houses, and the pens for cattle which were situated opposite them, were long conspicuous features in this part of the town : at the period of our survey, however, neither the slaughter-houses nor the cattle-pens existed. In place of the latter, there stood near the bank of the trench of the palisades, and in inconveniently close prox- imity to the gate of the town, the house built more than twenty years before, by Director-General Van Twiller, for Tymen Jansen, the master ship-carpenter at New Amsterdam for the West India Company, Of Tymen Jansen's antecedents but little appears in the early records. He was born about the year 1603, and came to New Amsterdam a young man, for he was in the employ of the Company before 1633. He was a busy man in his occu- pation, and during Director Van Twiller's term of office, from 1633 to 1638, he is said, in a report soon after the latter date, to have " made many repairs, and built new vessels, with a wood-cutters' boat, and various farm boats and skiffs," so that the shore opposite his house, and near the foot of the present Wall Street, must have been the scene of considerable activity in these first ship-building operations of New York. To the house was attached almost half an acre of ground.^ The building must have stood very nearly upon the spot now (1901) occupied by a stationer's shop under the Seaman's Savings Bank, but projecting somewhat out into the present Pearl Street, the road at this place appearing to have originally curved to the eastward a little more than do the lines of Pearl Street ; the straightening, doubtless, took place at the time of building the gate in the palisades, in 1653. Here Tymen ^ Prominent :ihioiiane. See Brugh Steegh. Bridge Street. See Brugh Straet. Bridges, Charles, 185, Ui et seq., 218. Broad Street. *S'ee Bloramaerts Vh', The Ditch, and Heere Graft. Broad Street, gate at, 274. Broen, Tonias, 27(j, note. Bronck, Jonas, 108, 1G4, 193. Brouwer, Adam, 24. Brouwer Straet, 6, 7, note, 69. Brown, William, 69. Bruce, John and Lysbet, 318, note. Brugh Steegh, 33 /closed, 34. Brugh Straet, 6. Brutell, Peter and Margaretha, 318, note. Bruynsen, Hage, 321. Buccaneers, the, 210. Burger, Engeltje. See Mans, Engeltje. Burger, Hermanns. 234. Burger, Johannes, 234. Burger's Mill, Sluice, and Kill, 232. Burger's Path, 222, 224, 243. See Appen- di.K I. Bushwick Creek and Bushwick, 323. Cabins, earl}', at New Amsterdam, 2. Calder, Jochem, 163. Canapaukah Creek, 168, 228, 231. Cai)ske, Tlie. See Schreyers Hoek. Carpenel, Jan Jacobsen, 164. Carstensen, Claes, 161, 162; Indian inter- preter. 162. note. Catiemuts Hoek, 4, 330. Cattle Pens, the, 275. Cedar, the privateer, 214. Central Park, New York, 72. Chatham Square. 331. Cherry Garden, the, 338. CherrV Street, 339. Church, Dutch, of 1626 in Barkmill, 155 et seq.: of 1633, 16; description of, 58; its parsonage and stable, 59; becomes a pri- vate house, 60; 147, Appendix I.; of 1642 (in fort), 17, 58, note, 59, 109, 148. Church Lane, 57, 58, 59. City Tavern. -See Stadts Herbergh. Claaver Weytje, 275, 285, note, 295, 298. Claessen, Dirck, the potter, 345. Claessen, Sibout, 125, 126. Cleer, George, 341, 342. Cliff Street, 311, 317. Clock, Abraham Martensen, 222. Clopper, Cornells, 279, 302. Coenties Alley. See StadtHuys Lane. Coersen, Arent, 284. Coersen, Barent, 170. Cohn, or " Cawyn," Jacob, 86, note. Colve, Governor, 204 ; demolition of build- ings by, 274. Common Pasture, the Second, 4; the First, 62. See also Schaapen Weide, 152. See 271, note, 311, 330, 338. Company's Vly, the, 81. Coorn, Nicholas, 180, 238. Cornelissen, Albert, 301. Cornelissen, Dirck, 225, 239, 240, 242, 245, 276, note, 341. Cornelissen, Lourens, skipper, 298, 299, 303. Cornelissen, Pieter (Timmerman),35 et seq., garden of, on Brouwer Straet, 35; his mill on Wessell's Creek, 36. Cornell, Rebecca, 196. Cornell, Sarah, marries Thomas Willet, 193 ; marries Charles Bridges, 194. /See 195. Cornell, Thomas, 193. Corstiaensen, Hendrick, 151. Cousseau, Jacques, 158, note. Cox, Alice, "alias Bono," 249. Cox, Sarah. See Bradley, Sarah. Cox, William, 249, 250, 251. Craie, Tennis, 82 et seq.; his houses on the Ditch, 84; sells house to the Jews, 86; his Long Island grant, 89; small house on Broad Street, 90. Cregier, Martin, Captain, 243. Croesens, Claas, 270, note. Custom House, first, of New York, 53. Cuville, or Cuvilje, Adriana, 300 ; marries Jan Damen, 307 ; her children, 307. Dacosta, Joseph, 86, note, 147. Damen, Jan Jansen, leases land of the West India Co., 9; wounds Philip Ge- raerdy, 11; trespasses of his cattle, 62. See 81. Shrovetide dinner at his house, 102 ; visits the Netherlands and pur- chases the "Great Bouwery" for Stuy- vesant. 119, note; 148, 152, 240; the outhoek of his farm, 208, note, 271, 274, 275, 285 ; association with Maryn Adri- aensen, 292, 295, 297; his brew'ery, 298; marriage to Adriana Cuville, 307. *See 322, 324, 328. Danckers, Justus, view of New Amster- dam, 49, note. Appendix I., 129, 155. D'Andradi, Salvador, 86. Danielse, "Mother," Anneken, 270, note. Danker and Sluyter, the missionaries, 321; Journal of, 306. Danker and Sluj'ter, view of New Amster- dam, 55, 186, 189, 243, note, 335. Davidson, Joris. 124. note. Decker, Johan de, 42. De Foreest, Hendrick, 71. De Foreest, Isaac, buys old church, 59; his house, 71 et seq.; a pioneer of Harlem, 72; his brewery, 73, 148. De Groot, Willem Pietersen, 345. De Koningh, Frederic, Capt., 179. De La Nov, Abraham, 178. Delavall, Thomas, 12, note. De Lucinn, Abraham, 80, note. De Meyer, Nicholas, 148, 170, 308. De Mever, William, 171. De Silfe, Nicasius, 151, 169. De Truv, Philip, 301, note; his house on East River shore, 326, 335, 339. INDEX 359 Deutel Bay, 83, note, 327. De Vos, Mathew, marries widow of Philip Geraerdy, 12 ; iiis land on Hoo{^h Straet, 127. De Vries, David, Captain, his account of the massacre of the Indians at Pavonia, 23; his grant on Staten Island, 97. Dickenson, Joanna, 125. Dillon, Daniel, attempts to burn \Vm. Pat- erson's house in New York, 202. Dircksen, Barent, 313, 314, note. Dircksen, Cornells, ferryman, 48, 6G, 242, 244, 245, 340. Dirty Lane. See Slyck Steegh, 154. "Distelvink, Den," — poems of Jacob Steendam, 132 et seq. Ditch, the, 82, 83, 105, 323. Ditch of the Palisades, 274. Dock, the public, 73. Doeckles, Willem, 89. Dominicus, Reynier, 308. Dominie's Bouwery, the, 16. Dominie's Hoek, 16. Dongan, Governor, 245. Doughty, Francis, Rev., 219. Drisius, Dominie Samuel, his house, 49; land in the Sheep Pasture, 151. Duke's Street. See Hoogh Straet. Dutch Kills, the, 228. Du Trieux. See De Truy. Duyckink, Evert, the glassmaker, 158, 221. Duvtts, Laurens, 1G4. Dj'knian, Jan, 163. Dyre, William, 55. Easthampton. Long Island, descendants of Cornells Mel^-n at. See Appendix IL Ebel, Pieter, 181. Ellet's, or Elliott's Alley, 173. Elliott, Richard, 160, note, 173. Ellsworth, Stoffel, 65. Emott, James, 259. Enckhuysen, city of, in the 17th century, 131. "English Quarter," the, 192. Evertsen, Wessell, the fisher, 171 et seq., 199. Exchange Place. See Tuyn Straet. Fair Street. See Fulton Street. Felle, Simon, 150. Ferrj' to Long Island, 6, 49 ; leased by Captain Tomassen, 66; hamlet at, 319, 339; establishment of, 340; Eghbert van Dorsum, ferry-master, 342. Fiscal, House of the, 33. "Five Houses," the. 5, 13, 31; confiscated by the English and demolished, 32; at- tachmenton, b}- George Baxter, 32, note. Fletcher, Benjamin, Colonel, Governor of New York, 253, 255. Dodder, Jacob. 272, 304, note. Forbus, Jan, 102. Forrester, Andrew, 93, note, 179. Fort Amsterdam, 5, 7, 182. "Fortune of New Netherland," ship con- fiscated by Stuyvesant's orders, 119, 178. Francen, Bout, 314, 315. Frera, David, 86, note. Fulton Street, 317, 324. Fyn, Francis, Capt., 167. Gabry, Pieter and Sons, of Amsterdam, 53, 54, 284. Galnia. See Jansen, Sybrant. Garden Street. See Tuvn Straet. Garland, John, 197, 198." Geraerdy, Jan, 12, Geraerdy, Philip, keeps the White Horse Tavern, 7; accidentally wounded, 11; his later residence, 12, 63. Gerritsen, Adriaen, 178. Gerritsen, Philip, 178, 180. " Gideon," slave-ship, 42. Glazier Street, the, 233, note. Glen, Alexander. See Leendertsen, Sander. Golden Hill, 310. Gold Street, 271, note, 310. Goulder, William, 341, 342. Gouwenbergh, the, 297, 298, 310. Graham, James, Recorder, is mysteriously wounded, 318. " Great Bouwery," the, purchased by Di- rector Stuyvesant, 119, note. Great Tavern, the. See Stadts Herbergh. Great Tree, the, 325, 339. Green Lane, the, 297, note. Haes, Roeloff Jansen, 47. Haie, Jacob, 57, 162; burning of his farm- house, 169. See 323. Hall, Thomas, his house at " The Ferry," 325 et seq. ; one of the first English set- tlers, 327; marries Anna Mitford, 327; prominent in New Amsterdam, 328, 337. Hanover Square, its associations, 223. See 243, note, 244, Appendix I. Hardenbrook, Andries and Femmetje, 318, note. Harlem, earh' settlements at, 72, 108. Harpendinck, John, 316. Hartgers, Pieter, 80. Hartgers view of New Amsterdam, 2, note; 155, note. Heathcote, George, 291. Heere Graft, 82, 123, 149. Heermans or Herrman, Augustyn, 50, note; warehouse of, 53; financial diffi- culties, 54; residence on East River, 281; his early life in Prague, 281 et seq.; enters Wallenstein's service, 283, 285; difficulties with Director Stuyvesant, 287 ; deputized to visit the governor of Maryland, his journey, 288; his artistic talents, 288, note; his survey and map of Maryland, 289; manor of Bohemia, 290; supposed artist of the " Vander- donck view of New Amsterdam," Ap- pendix I, 360 INDEX Hellekers, Jacob, 306, .321. Hendrickse, Trvntje, 300. Hendricksen, Claes, 208, 2(59, 276, 277. Hendricksen, Harmeu, 168. Herrman, Augustine. See Ileermans. Hewit, Raudel, 220. Hollar, Wenceslas, 288, note. Holmes, George, 14, 326, 327. Hooghlandt, Christopher, l'J8. Hoogh Straet, or High Street, its origin, 6, 104; straightened, 123, 153, 176. Hoorn's Hoek, 126, note. Indians, massacre of Weckquaskeek tribe, 1643, 22; compensation to Mo- hawks for destruction of their house, 71 ; expedition against Raritans, 97; massa- cre of Weckquaskeeks, 103; devastate Staten Island in 1643, 104 ; their incur- sions of 1655, 165; destroy Achter Col, 178; attack Allerton's warehouse, 336. Isolated plantations, order against, 169. Israel, David, 86, note. Jacobs, Magdalentje, 148. Jacobsen, Cornells, 313, 314, 315. Jacobsen, Jan, 180. Jacobsen, Rutger, 172 et seq. Janse, Annetje, wife of Roeloff Jaasen, and of Dominie Bogardus, 14 et seq.; spends her latter years at Albany, 29. See 46. Janse, Ariaentje, marries Govert Loocker- mans, 237 ; her death, 241. Janse, Hester, 146. Janse, Marritje, 239, 240 ; her will, slaves, etc., 241, note; marries Govert Loocker- mans, 241; previous marriage to Dirck Cornelissen, 242. -S'ee 245, note, 276. Jansen, Antony van Salee, 146. Jansen, Antony van Vees, 313. Jansen, Barent, 161, 162. Jansen, Carsten, 158, note. Jansen, Cornells, 159, note. Jansen, Harmanus, 270, note. Jansen, Hendrick, baker, 14. Jansen, Hendrick, tailor, sails on the " Princess," 27 ; house on Hoogh Straet, 225, 229; animosity towards Kieft, 229; lined and banished, 230; his widow, 277 ; land on East River, 279 et seq.. 285. Jansen, Jan van St. Obin. See St. Obin. .Jansen, Michiel, 232, note. Jansen, Fieter, 280. Jansen, Fieter, Noorman, 102. Jansen, Roeloff, 15. Jansen, Sybrant, Galma, 128. Jansen, Tvmen, 241, 268, note; 271, mnster ship carpenter of West India Co., 275 et seq. Jansen, Willeni, 121. Jessup, Edward, 193. Jews' Lane, the, 155, note. Jews, the, in New Amsterdam, 84 et seq. 87, synagogue of, 87, note, 160. Jochemsen, Andries, his tavern, 268, 269. Jonas, " Tryn," mother of Annetje Janse Bogardus, 15. Jorissen, Burger, his first house on Hoogh Straet, 104, 105, 128, note, 128; his lane to the river. Burger's Fath, 222, 224; Burger's smithy, 225, 230; early home, 226; comes to New Amsterdam, 227; his plantation on the Dutch Kills, 228. See 229. Buys Hendrick Jansen's house, 230; troubles with the authorities of New Amsterdam, 231; his mill and sluice, 231, 232; new dwelling, 232; re- moves to Long Island, 233, 285. Kerfbyl, Johannes, Dr., 159, 160. Kidd, Sarah. 3; banishment, 64; is provoost or jailer, 65. RoelofEse, Sara, daughter of Annetje Janse, marriage to Dr. Kiersted, 46, 59. Root, Simon, 187. Ron, Louis, Rey., grant of escheated land to him, 160, note. Rousby, Christopher, 266. Rousby, Sarah. See Bradley, Sarah. Rust, Claes Janscn, 66. Ruyter, Claes de, 167, 168, 169. Rycken, Abraham, S.J, 150. Rycken, Hendrick, 316. Samsens, Geertruyd, 170. Schaapen Weide, or Sheep Pasture, 4, note. See also "Common Pasture," 150, 151, 152, 271, note. Schabanck, Pieter, 86. Scheerenborgh, Tryntje, 277. Schellinger, Abraham, 159. Appendix II. Schollinger, .lacob, marries Cornelia Mel3'n, 122. 'See 123, Appendix II. Schenectady massacre, Glenn mansion, etc., 304,"305. Schoorsteenveger. See Andriessen, Pieter. Schreyers Hoek, 19, 73, 109; general gath- ering of Indians and treaty at, 162, note. Schrick, Paulus, 71. Schutt, Cornells, 47. Sebrah, Clement, 158, note. Sebring, Cornells, 301, note. Seutter yiew of New Amsterdam, 244, note, 280, 286. Shirt Case, the, 182. Shoemakers' Pasture, the, 316. " Shrovetide Dinner," the, 102. Siinonse, Hendrickje, 158. Slangh, Jacob, killed in the fort, 294. Slaughter Houses, the, 275. Sloat Lane. See Sloot. Sloot, and Sloot Lane, 241, 243. Slot, Jan Janseii, 291. Sloughter, Governor, 246. Slvck Steegh, the, 151; in Amsterdam, 153; called Dirty Lane, 154, 155, 158, 160, note. 173, '233, note, 271, note, 285. Smedes, Jan, 2.33, note, 316. Smeeman, Ilarman, 314, note. Smith, .lames, 69. Smith, Richard, 218 et seq. Smith, Richard, junior, 220. Smith's Island, 219. Smith Street, 153. 2.3.3.285. Smith, William Peart n-e, 270, note. Smits Vly, small gate in palisades at, 274; descrip'tion of, 279, 299, 306, 325. Soulh William Street. See Slvck Steegh. Stadt Iluys, 88, 126, 129. See' also Stadts Herbergh; meeting of delegates at, 183; municipal government installed at, 184; granted to city, 185; shore front im- proved, 185; views of, 186; dinner to Stuyvesant at, 186; used for storage purposes, 187; desired for school, 187; courts in, 188; building becomes dilap- idated and is sold, 189. Stadt Huys Lane, 176. Stadts Herbergh, 88, 104; of Amsterdam, 176; of New Amsterdam, 176 et seq. See also Stadt Huys ; dimensions, garden, etc., 177; first landlord, historic inci- dents, etc., 178; used as place of deten- tion, 178; festivities at, 180; affrays at, 181; courts held at, 182. See 187. Staten Island, grant to Cornells Melyn, 96; Baron Van der Capellen's interest in, 118; devastated bv the Indians in 164.3, 104; again in 1655, 127; Melyn surrenders patroonship, 122. States-General of the Netherlands, Melyn and Kiiyter before, 114; charges against the West India Company before, 119, note. Steendam, Jacob, the poet, 128 et seq. ; birthplace of, 131; in service of West India Company, 132; his poems, "Den Distelvink," 132; life in Africa, 136; arrives at New Amsterdam, 136; poems on New Netherland, 137 ; leaves for Holland, 141; his life at Batavia, 142. Stevenson, Jan, schoolmaster, 63. Stevensen, Joris do Caper, 167, 168. Stevenson, Thomas, 345. St. George Tavern, 304. Stille, Cornelis Jacobsen. See Jacobsen, Cornells. Sti Iman, Jan Hendricksen, called " Koopal," 221, ,324. Stilwell, Nicholas, 326. St. Obin, Jan Jansen van, 41 et seq. Stone Street. See Brouwer Straet, and Hoogh Straet; small house on, 90, note. Storehouse of West India Company, 18, 45; new storehouse, 52; Oloff van Cort- landt is keeper, 76. See Appendix I. Stoutenburgh, Pieter, 57. Straetmaker, Dirck, and wife, killed by Indians, 193. Stuyvesant, Petrus, Director-General, house on Schreyers Hoek, 20, 42, 47, 50; in awe of Captain Van der Grift, 51 ; his unpopularity, 74; grant of the "Great Bouwery," 83, note, 85, 91; his hypoc- risy on trial of Picquct, 92; arrival at New Amsterdam, 109; hatred of Melyn and Kuyter, 110; fines and banishes Melyn and Kuyter, 111; his judgments suspended by the States-General, 116; sends Secretary Van Tienhoven to the Netherlands, 116; purchases the " Great I'.ouwery," 119, note; confiscates the ship" Fortune," and Jlelvn's property in New Amsterdam, 120, 125, 148, 169"; at the meeting of delegates. 183; dinner to, at Stadt liuys, 186; 194, 242,244, 286, 364 INDEX 287; his deputation to the Governor of Maryland, 288. Stymetz, Caspar, 14. Sunswick Creek, 165. "Swamp, The," 325, 331, 337, 338, 330, 340. Swits, Claes Cornelissen, 69 ; murder of b}- Indians, 98. Syboutsen, Harck, 314, note. Synagogue of Jews, 87, note, 160. "Tabasco," Spanish ship, affair of, 70. Tan pits, the, 316. Taylor, William, 203, note. Ten Eyck, Coenrad, 316. Teunissen, Aert, 126, note. Teunissen, Gysbtirt, 164. Teunissen, RoelofE, Captain, 323, 324. Teunissen, Seger, 107. Theobalds, John, 249, note. Thirty Years' War, the, its part in the colonization of New Netherland, 225. Tienhovcn Street, 285, note. Tomasseii, Willem, or "lelmer," Captain, 66 et seq., 340. Trinity Church, 272, 273, 274. Trinity Church Yard, 107. Tuder, John, 250. Tuvn Straet, 151. '"Twelve Men," the, 100. Tymense, Elsie, 242; marries Pieter Cor- nelissen Vanderveen, 242; marries Jacob Leisler, 242. See Leisler, Elsie, 276. Tysen, Jacob, 65. Tvssens, Lvsbet, wife of Maryn Adriaen- "sen, 291, "294, 295. Underhill, .John, Captain, 180. Van Borsum, Cornelis, 149. Van Borsum, P^ghbert, 115; his house at the Ferry, 342, 343. Van Brugge, Carel, 151. See also Bridges, Charles. Van Brugh, Johannes, 149. Van Commel, Teunis Jansen, 168, 169. Van Cortlandt, Catharine, her church at Sleepy Hollow, 78. Van Cortlandt, Oloff Stevenseii, suit against Dominie Bogardiis for slander, 26 ; 57, 64 ; comes to New Amsterdam 75 et seq. ; marries Anneken Loocker- mans, 76; his brewery, 77; burgo- master of the citj', 78; his familv, 79; 89, 149, 237. Van Cortlandt, Stephanns, 246. Van Couwenhoven, Gerrit Woiphertscn, 144. 145. Van Couwenhovpn, Jacob Wolphertsen, buj's old church, 59; his family, 144, et seq.; his speculations, 146; his brew- ery, 147; pecuniary embarrassments, 148, 149, 151 ; his stone house on Hoogh Straet, 170. Van Couwenhoven, Pieter "Wolphertsen, his houses on Stone Street, 79 : family, 144; 148. Van Couwenhoven, Wolphert Gerritsen, 144, 145, note. Van Curler, Arent, 269. Vander Bogaerdt, Harmanus Meyndertsen, surgeon of West India Co., 11, 68, et seq.; tragical death of, 71. Vander Capellen, Henryk, enters into partnersliip with Cornelis Melyn, 118; sues the West India Company for seiz- ure of his ship, 120, 178. Vanderclvff, Dirck Jansen, 317. Vanderclyff, Geesje, 317, 318. Vanderclyffs Street. See Cliff Street. Vander Donck, Adriaen, his " Vertoogh " or " Remonstrance," to the States-Gen- eral, 51, 116, 287. Vander Donck, View of New Amsterdam, 50, note. Appendix I. Vander Grift, Jacob Leer.dertscn, 50, 300, Vander Grift, Paulus Leendertsen, 47; his warehouse, 50 et seq., 54, 337. Vanderveen, Pieter ('ornelissen, 242. Vandcrvin, Hendrick Jansen, 121. Vanderwel, Lourens Cornelissen. See Cornelissen, Lourens. Vandewater, Hendrick, 149, 305. Van Dyke, Hendrick, assault on, 11 ; his festivities at the Tavern, 65 ; 171. Van Geele, Maximilian, 14. Van Hardenbergh, Arnoldus, 79. Van Hardenbergh, Johannes, 80. Van Hol)oken, Harmanus, 187. Van Holsteyn, Nicholas. See De Meyer. Van Hoorn, Jan Cornelissen, 141. Van Inibroeck, Gysbert, 86. Van Neck, Lambert Aelberts, 200, note. Van Euyven, Cornelis, 32, note, 137. Van Steenwyck, Abraham Jacobsen, 46. Van Steenwyck, Cornelis Jacobsen, 46 et seq. ; burgomaster and mavor, 48, 49, 198, 203. Van Tienhoven, Aefje, marries Pieter Stoutenburgh, 57. Van Tienhoven, Cornelis, Secretary, his character, 55; his residence, 57. See 77; leads expedition against Karitan Indians, 97; at the " Shrove-tide Dinner," 103; sent by Stuyvesant to the Netherlands, 116 ; his defiance of the States-General, 119, note; his land on Hoogh Straet, 128; on the sheep pasture, 151; grudges against August}'!! Heeniians, 287, 203, 208; his land in" Sniits Vly, 306; marries Rachel Vinje, 307 ; house on East River Shore, 308; his bouwery of " Wallen- stein," and lane, 309 et seq.; his patro- nvmic, 313, note ; leases his bouwerv, 314, 315; sale of the bouwery, 316. See 319, 339. Van Tienhoven, .Tannetje, daughter of the Secretary, 57, 58. Van Tienhoven, Lucas, 57, 58. Van Tieiihoven's Lane, 310 et seq.; regu- lated in 1642, 311, note, 271, note, 330. Van Twiller, Woutei-, Director-General, INDEX 365 his landed interests, 76. See 236, 275; tobacco plantations, 327. Varrevanger, Jacob, 57, 128. Verbrugf^e, Gillis, 237. Verdon, Magdalena, 24. Verlett, Janneken, marries Augustyn Heerm.ins, 285. Verlett, Nicholaes, 285. Verplanck, Abraham Isaacsen, at the " Shrove-tide Dinner," 103. See 319, 324 Versche "Water. See Kolck, 338, 346. Views of New Amsterdam. See under Hartgers, Danckers, Danker and Sluy- ter, Visscher, Vander Donck, Allaerdt, Sentter, Moiitanus, etc. Vincent, Adriaen, 150. Vinje, Jan, his brewery on the Maagde P'aetje, 298; on the East River, 306; sup- posed to be the first born in New Neth- erland of European parentage, 306, 307, 308. Vinje, Eachel, marries Secretary Van Tienhoven, 57, 307. Vinje, Willeni (or Vigne), 306; his chil- dren, 307, 322, 324. Visscher View of New Amsterdam, 49, note, 59, 288, note. Vogelsang, Marcus Hendricksen, 232. Volckertsen, Cornells, 322. See 301, note. Volckertsen, Dirck, 162, 240, 267, 268, notes; his house near tlie ferry, 319, 32!; one of the earliest settlers, 322; marries Christina Vinje, 322; his lands at the Normans Kill, 323. Waal, or sheet-piling along river, 126, 278. Waldron, Resolved, 43, 163 ; sent on depu- tation to Maryland, 288. " Wallenstein," bouwerv of, 312, et sea., 310. Wallenstein, Count, 283. Wall Street. See Palisades of 1653. Wansaer, Jan, 41. Water, 't, 45 et seq. Water Pooi't, the, 273, 274. Webb, James, his tavern, 304. Weigh House, the, 73. Wessells, Jochem, of Albany, 199. Wessells, Warner, 29. Westchester Colonists, their arrest, 179. West India Company, its records, 1 ; its bouwerys, 3 ; workshops, 5, 31 ; garrison, 10; storehouse, 18, 52; its colonial ofli- cers, 21; brewery of, 34; Pack Huts or Custom House, 52; the great bouwery of, 83, note; memorial of the "eight men " to, 105; malignant feeling of di- rectors towards Cornells Melyn,114,note; attacked by the ''Remonstrance" of Van der Donck, 116 ; answer before the States-General, 117; sued by Baron Van der Capellen for Stuvvesant's acts, 120; builds City Tavern, '176; barn of, 182; grant of municipal government, 184; hires Van Tienhoven's garden, 310. White Hall, the, 20. Whitehall .Street, Appendix I. White Horse Tavern, 7 etseq.; affrav at, II, 61. Willemsen, Hendrick, baker, 93, 317. WlUemsen, Rynier, 126, note. William Stree't. See Smith Street, 233. Willet, Thomas, at Dominie Bogardus's part}', 180; his grant next the Great Tavern, 192; marries Sarah Cornell, 193. Willet, Thomas (2d), 195. Willet, Captain Thomas, 51, 192, 305. Willet, William, 195. Winckel Straet, 13 ei seq.; closed in 1680, 32, 72. Windmill on Nutten Island, 5; near the fort, 7. See 155, note. Withart, Johannes, 174. Wolphert Gerritsen's Vly, 338, 341, 346, Woolsej^ George, 195, 196, 335, 336, 337. !BFo'26 'i'%5|jT|:5* 200 93 ^ i>i^ * f 'O. ^-^'^ ^\ .*^^ ♦ ;-, ■^Oa ;~r C. ♦ »■»«, 5v-'v>-';>< 'o»r '>.;--i<.'^'X'"->^^r^X^^^^ D'A * p f '><.^. * -o ^p-^^. ^. * e ^■f^ '>:^ :<» ^ V¥4 HECKMAN BINDERY INC. 1993 „_^ N. MANCHESTER, ^^ INDIANA 46962