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one else was qualified to advise him (he did, after all, write his letters in Latin and was a talented watercolorist). His law-and-order campaign lost momentum, and Dominie Bogardus, for one, was furious that Kieft “permitted the officers and soldiers to perform all kinds of noisy plays during the sermon, near and around the church, rolling ninepins, bowling, dancing, singing, leaping, and other profane exercises.” (Kieft, in turn, accused Bogardus of frequently delivering his Sunday sermon in a drunken stupor.) Everybody quickly found out, too, that Kieft was a grafter whose cunning and greed made Van Twiller look like a saint. His morals were compared to those of ravens, “who rob whatever falls in their way.” In the end, though, it was Kieft’s Indian policy that brought the opposition to a head and nearly finished off the colony.

New Amsterdam’s first dozen years hadn’t been happy ones for its Lenape neighbors. With the influx of colonists came the unfamiliar diseases—smallpox, typhus, measles, diphtheria—that would in time cut the Lenape population to a mere 10 percent of what it had been at the beginning of the century. Their conflicts with settlers, magnified by the increasing availability of guns and alcohol, grew more frequent as well as more violent. European cows and swine trampled their planting fields, while heavy cutting for firewood and building materials wiped out the forests where they hunted game. The Lenapes retaliated by killing the livestock (and occasionally their owners), but this shrinking resource base left them increasingly dependent on the production of maize and wampum to obtain trade goods.

As suppliers of wampum, the Lenapes became increasingly tempting prey for rival fur-trading interests. After the fighting between them ended in 1628, both the Mohawks and Mahicans sent raiding parties to collect tribute from Lenape groups in the lower Hudson region. In the bloody Pequot War of 1637, the New England colonies won control of wampum production on the shores of Long Island Sound. The Dutch were slower to act, and cancellation of the West India Company’s monopoly touched off a furious competition for pelts by independent traders called bosch loopers (runners of woods), many of whom were former company functionaries, tradesmen, and farmers. By the time Kieft arrived on the scene, protecting their sources of wampum—now legal tender in New Amsterdam—had become a matter of real urgency.

In 1639, on the preposterous theory that the West India Company was protecting them from their enemies, Kieft demanded “contributions” in wampum, maize, and pelts from Lenape bands living near New Amsterdam. They were perplexed and irritated by the idea: Kieft “must be a very mean fellow,” the Tappans grumbled, “to come to live in this country without being invited by them, and now wish to compel them to give him their corn for nothing.” The following spring angry Raritans drove a Dutch trading party off Staten Island in a shower of arrows.

In the summer of 1641, when the Raritans again refused to pay and allegedly killed some swine from David de Vries’s new plantation on Staten Island, Kieft dispatched Provincial Secretary Cornelius van Tienhoven with eighty-odd soldiers to teach them a lesson. After the soldiers slew three or four Indians and tortured the sachem’s brother “in his private parts with a piece of split wood,” the infuriated Raritans fell upon De Vries’s plantation, killed four of his people, and burned all the buildings. To the nervous inhabitants of New Amsterdam this Pig War, as it came to be known, was entirely Kieft’s fault (De Vries himself charged that company soldiers, not Indians, had killed his pigs). In a bid to placate the critics, Kieft invited the heads of families in New Amsterdam to choose twelve men to help him decide what to do next.

And what, Kieft asked the Twelve, should be done about the recent killing of an elderly Dutch wheelwright, Claes Smits, by Wiechquaesgecks? If they refused to hand over the culprit—and the sachem allegedly said “he was sorry that twenty Christians had not