Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [32]
Van Twiller arrived in 1633 with a hundred-odd soldiers, the first regular troops to be stationed in the colony. He made a show of sealing the border between New Netherland and New England by erecting a fortified trading post called the House of Good Hope (now Hartford) on the Connecticut River, but to no avail. The English coolly ignored the House of Good Hope, and the callow Van Twiller, unwilling to make a fight of it, abandoned the company’s jurisdiction over the Connecticut River Valley.
Van Twiller’s administration of New Amsterdam was no more successful. He attempted to rehabilitate the fort and did manage to build a new bakehouse, a “small house” for the midwife, a goathouse, and a proper church. He drank too much, on the other hand—once, in an alcoholic rage, he even chased Dominie Everardus Bogardus, Michaelius’s replacement, around town “with a drawn knife”—and spent too much time scheming to acquire land for himself and his cronies under the company’s patroonship plan. At one time or another Van Twiller owned what are now Governors, Wards, and Roosevelt islands, as well as tobacco plantations in what are now Greenwich Village and the Red Hook section of Brooklyn. (Easily grown on fields already cleared by the Lenapes, tobacco was a profitable and popular crop.)
Ironically, although the West India Company hadn’t yet decided to try again to promote settlements outside New Amsterdam, Van Twiller’s landgrabbing helped establish the first Dutch colonists across the East River on Long Island. Between 1636 and 1638 he registered the “purchase” from various Lenape sachems of better than fifteen thousand acres of land at three locations in what is now Brooklyn. One site, in Gowanus, belonged to William Adriaense Bennett and Jacques Bentyn. Another, on Wallabout Bay, belonged to Joris Jansen de Rapalje, a Walloon. The third site, by far the best and largest, lay on the broad, treeless plains just to the north and west of Jamaica Bay where the Canarsees had maintained planting fields. Part of it was reserved by Van Twiller for his own use, part belonged to Jacob van Corlear, and part was held by two partners, Andries Hudde and Wolphert Gerritsen (for whom Gerritsen Beach is named).
Only Hudde and Gerritsen attempted to occupy their portion—known variously as Achtervelt (i.e., after or beyond the plains or flats of south-central Brooklyn), New Amersfort (Gerritsen’s hometown in Holland), or simply Flatlands. The two partners broke ground in 1636 near where the Flatlands Dutch Reformed Church now stands at the intersection of Flatbush Avenue and Kings Highway. An inventory made two years later reveals that they had put up a house, barn, and hayrick. The house was twenty-six feet long, twenty-two feet wide, and forty feet high, “covered above and all around with boards” and “surrounded by long, round palisades”—evidently a precaution against Indian attack. The partners had thirty-two acres of land sown with summer and winter grain as well as a garden planted with fruit trees. Their livestock included a half-dozen cows, several oxen, and five horses. This brave little beginning didn’t inspire others to follow in their footsteps, however: a full decade would pass before the West India Company could point to more than a sprinkling of settlers anywhere on Long Island.
While New Amsterdam struggled along, Holland was seized by the Tulip Mania, a bizarre speculative frenzy that boosted the price of tulip bulbs to unheard-of levels before it collapsed in February 1637, wiping out innumerable unwary investors and generating widespread unemployment. The States-General began to talk of exporting the indigent to New Netherland—at which point it became