Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [33]
Their first move was to fire Van Twiller and annul his various land purchases. The second, which took two years to complete, was a revision of the Freedoms and Exemptions that made the first deliberate provision for settlements outside New Amsterdam. Prospective emigrants to New Netherland were now promised cheap transportation, up to two hundred acres of land, and a schoolmaster for the education of their children. Except for minor regulatory taxes on imports and exports, the company also consented to permit free trade in the colony, abandoning the commercial monopoly it had so jealously guarded for twenty years.
The fate of the new policy hinged on the company’s third move, its appointment of Willem Kieft as director of New Netherland. Kieft was a merchant with excellent family connections and a reputation for learning. He was also rumored to be something of a crook. According to one story, he had recently left France “in a hurry.” According to another, he had once absconded with money raised to ransom Christians imprisoned by the Turks. Considering the havoc Kieft would wreak on New Netherland over the coming eight or nine years, the company’s directors would have done well to inquire into such talk a bit more closely.
PERSONNEL AND CHATTEL
When Kieft stepped ashore in 1638, New Amsterdam was a collection of eighty or ninety structures occupied by four hundred or so people—not much bigger, in other words, than it had been a dozen years earlier in the days of Peter Minuit. (Boston, four years younger, already boasted a thousand inhabitants.) Most of the town lay along crooked footpaths to the east and south of the ramparts of Fort Amsterdam. A string of buildings followed the East River shore along what is now Pearl Street as far as a sluggish creek known as Blommaert’s Vly (Broad Street). No more than a handful stood on the far side of Smit’s Vly (the foot of Maiden Lane).
Everything in sight belonged to the West India Company, and the company had never been diligent about maintenance, let alone appearances. Everywhere Kieft looked he saw chaos, squalor, and dilapidation. Fort Amsterdam, he informed the West India Company, was “totally and wholly in a ruinous condition, so that people could go in and out of said fort on all sides.” The director’s house needed “considerable repairs,” as did the company’s five stone workshops, the wooden church built by Van Twiller, and the smith’s house. The thirty cabins built a decade earlier were still standing, though many were now occupied by sheep and pigs. Of the four windmills belonging to the company, only one gristmill and one sawmill remained in operation. Owing to a recent fire, “the place where the Public store stood can with difficulty be discovered.” North of town, along the axis still called the Bowery, the company’s five farms lay “vacant and fallen into decay; there was not a living animal on hand belonging to the Company on said Bouweries.” (In New Netherland, a “bouwerie” was a fully developed farm with livestock, in contrast to a “plantation,” which produced tobacco and other crops.)
As for the inhabitants of New Amsterdam, they had a good claim to being the motliest assortment of souls in Christendom. Probably only a narrow majority of the heavily male European population was Dutch, for Manhattan ran a distant fourth to Asia, Brazil, and the West Indies as a magnet for fortune seekers from the Netherlands. The rest were Walloons, English, French, Irish, Swedish, Danish, and German, among others—not to mention various Frisians sometimes confused with the Dutch, one Cicero Alberto (known around town as “the Italian”), and Anthony Jansen van Salee (a Muslim mulatto of mixed Dutch and Moroccan ancestry whom everyone called “the Turk”). Between them, Kieft told Father Isaac Jogues,