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WILD WEST ON THE HUDSON

The diversity of New Amsterdam’s inhabitants when Kieft arrived was matched only by their turbulence. Fully one-quarter of the town’s buildings were “grog-shops or houses where nothing is to be got but tobacco and beer,” he reported, and immoderate drinking caused daily “mischief and perversity.” This probably came as no surprise to company officials back in the Netherlands, as their profits from liquor sales ran second to those from the fur trade. For years the company had operated a brewhouse, which gave Brouwer Straet its name. It also sold imported wines and brandies at the company store and wholesaled liquor to the inhabitants, who were urged to retail it from their homes. Kieft himself proceeded to establish, on Staten Island, the first distillery in New Netherland.

During his first year in office alone, the new director heard over forty criminal cases involving slander, theft, assault, adultery, rape, and murder, with much of the trouble stemming from a skewed sex ratio as well as excessive drinking. Because the company had shown so little interest in promoting permanent settlement, there were many more men in town than women—and too many of those men were footloose bachelors, down-and-out adventurers, fugitive husbands, runaway servants, and waterfront riffraff who had decided to spend a few years toiling for the company while on their way from wherever to God-only-knows.

Particularly troublesome were the men of the Fort Amsterdam garrison, one or another of whom was always up on charges for drunkenness, fighting, destruction of civilian property, larceny, sleeping on duty, refusing to work, desertion, or insubordination. In June 1638 Kieft and the council hired Nicolaes Coorn as the company sergeant, explaining that “it is necessary to have some one to drill the soldiers in the proper use of arms” (a striking admission in its own right). Within months, however, doom’s unmilitary conduct had the barracks in an uproar. He stole from the troops and looked the other way when the troops in turn stole “turnips, chickens and tobacco pipes” from the company. He traded company property to the Indians for furs, then hid the contraband in his bunk. “Likewise,” according to the schout, he “has at divers times had Indian women and Negresses sleep entire nights with him in his bed, in the presence of all the soldiers.” The council eventually broke Coorn to the rank of private and condemned two fellow soldiers “to ride two hours on the wooden horse”—a military version of the pillory in which the culprit was made to straddle a high sawhorse, with weights up to fifty pounds attached to each leg. But nothing changed. The very next year a soldier named Gregoris Pietersen was executed by firing squad for urging the troops to mutiny.

Not only were there too few women in New Amsterdam, but too few women disposed to Calvinist order and decorum. In Europe, unmarried Dutch women struck foreigners, especially the French, as shockingly improper, given to public kissing, lewd talk, and a general lack of regard for chastity, though married housewives were as a rule accounted pillars of sobriety and virtue. On the colonial frontier, mores grew even more relaxed. Over and over again the magistrates came up against bawds and doxies like Nanne Beeche, who went to a party at the house of wheelwright Claes Cornelissen and, “notwithstanding her husband’s presence, fumbled at the front of the breeches of most all of those who were present,” setting off a near riot. Grietjen Reyniers, wife of Anthony “the Turk” Jansen, was said to have “pulled the shirts of some sailors out of their breeches and in her house measured the male members of three sailors on a broomstick”—which perhaps explained why when the crew of a departing ship caught sight of her on the shore they began chanting, “Whore, Whore, Two pound butter’s whore!” When she and her husband were finally expelled in 1639, they took up farming on Long Island in the vicinity of what is now New Utrecht. Their place was known for