Thursday Novel Excerpt: New York 4

The Fall of New Amsterdam

Continued from last week
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Roelof was prepared to fight the English with Stuyvesant, but everyone pleaded with Stuyvesant to sign a treaty instead. They were hardly any match for the four English warships sitting on the Hudson. Besides, these sorts of decisions would ultimately be decided by the powers back home and battles largely fought elsewhere. Their life was good. Why mess with it over someone else's ambitions?

The Dutch settlers were used to war. The "Eighty Year War" for Dutch independence from the Spanish had just finished in 1648, along with the "Thirty Year's War" in central Europe. The conflict was a string of battles stretched out over decades, with now the surrogates of the Spanish winning here, now those wanting independence winning there. The common European had come to see the senselessness of it all.

Life went on for the ordinary Dutch person. Powerful people did their thing. Occasionally they took your son to fight with one or another of them.

There were four Dutch "wars" between the English and the Dutch those next few years. The first took place just after Roelof came to New Amsterdam and didn't involve the colony at all. The second took place just after the English took the settlement, from 1665-67, but New York stayed in English hands.

Roelof was excited when for about a year (1673-74), the Third Dutch War resulted in the Dutch taking back the settlement. For a span of about 16 months, the town was renamed "New Orange." But the Titans elsewhere gave it away again, and it has been New York ever since.

Again, life went on. Whatever happened was God's will. Someone built a saw mill, then a leather mill on the island now known as Manhattan. Roelof was on town councils and was a church elder. Whether the English or the Dutch had a governor, his role pretty much stayed the same. He farmed. He prospered. He was involved in government. He had eleven children.

When the first Dutch Reformed Church was built in Flatlands around 1661, Roelof and his brother Jan were there, the first of the church's members. When the English recognized his village as a true town in 1667, he was there. In 1673, the English appointed him as a representative of that town and he was elected as a lieutenant of its militia.  In 1689 he served as the justice of Kings County.

In 1676 he had four horses, ten cows, 3 hogs. He had bought four slaves by 1698. By the year 1700, slavery was becoming a permanent state rather than servitude for a time. The Dutch were some of the worst slave-traders in that period.

In 1672, his wife Neeltje died, so he remarried to Anekke Pieterse Wyckoff in 1675. Then she died and he married the widow Katrina Cruiger in 1688.

Katrina was a widow of some means, with a child from the previous marriage. She was also thirty-seven--thirty-two years younger than him. This would require some careful legal pre-arrangement...

Thursday Novel Excerpt: Drowning in Full Armor 1

Ten years after Augustine Shelburne was born in Jamestown, Maarten Peterse Schenck von Nydeck boarded the ship de Valckener with his family for Nieuw Amsterdam. The year was 1650.

The family of Schenck was a military family. Martin's father and uncle had fought fiercely in the Dutch War of Independence from Spain, which lasted eighty years (1568-1648). However, his uncle--after whom he was named--had not always fought for the same side. And his uncle had not fared well in the Dutch courts. Why live in the Netherlands out of favor when you can carve out your own destiny in America?

The tale of his uncle Maartin was infamous. Born in Goch, he had first fought for William of Orange in the Dutch revolution as the head of twenty-two men. He successfully defended the castle of his ancestors, Bleijenbeek Castle, against attack from a province loyal to Spain. But then when Dutch courts had him forcibly removed and gave the castle to his cousin, he fought for the other side for a time. Whichever provinces he fought for generally won.

But it was his death that was most infamous. Fighting now on the side of Dutch independence again, he tried to sneak into the city of Nijmegen to take it by surprise with 20 barges of men. But because the river was flooded, they overshot their mark and entered into the windows of a house where a wedding was taking place.

The alarm was sounded. His men were pushed back. And Maartin himself ended up in the river in a full suit of armor. He inevitably drowned. And once the townspeople dredged him up, they took off his head--still with a scowl on his face--and stuck it on a pike. Then they drew and quartered his dead body, placing various body parts in public for all to see.