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By Root 7273 0

Island, and on Long Island, killing hundreds and taking many prisoners. Some of the captives were brought back to the fort, and an eyewitness reported that Kieft “laughed right heartily, rubbing his right arm and laughing out loud” as they were tortured and butchered by his soldiers. The soldiers seized one, “threw him down, and stuck his private parts, which they had cut off, into his mouth while he was still alive, and after that placed him on a mill-stone and beat his head off.” Secretary Van Tienhoven’s mother-in-law allegedly amused herself all the while by kicking the heads of other victims about like footballs. In a later raid on an Indian camp near Pound Ridge in Westcheser, Underhill and the Anglo-Dutch force were said to have slaughtered somewhere between five hundred and seven hundred more with a loss of only fifteen wounded.

Before the war finally ended in the summer of 1645, some sixteen hundred Indians and scores of colonists had died. Dozens of settlements throughout Long Island, Staten Island, present-day Westchester County, and southern Connecticut had been abandoned or destroyed. As one observer summed up the situation, Kieft’s misguided attempts to wring tribute from the Indians had “in a short time nearly brought this country to nought.” With the States-General again fretting that New Netherland would be lost to the English, the directors of the West India Company decided that Kieft would have to go. Orders for his recall were on their way to New Amsterdam before the year was out.

LOSING GROUND

During a lull in the fighting in the summer of 1643, it occurred to Kieft that New Amsterdam would be safer if more people lived in its immediate vicinity. Stepping up the pace of private land grants, he distributed nearly two dozen patents to prospective settlers whose farmsteads, mostly on Long Island, would create a buffer around Manhattan and serve as tripwires in the event of further attacks. (The following summer, to the same end, he would begin to settled manumitted slaves north of New Amsterdam.)

First to accept Kieft’s terms were Lady Deborah Moody and a phalanx of Anabaptists—ardent opponents of infant baptism and forerunners of Quakerism. Expelled from Massachusetts in the summer of 1643, they came down to New Netherland looking for a place to settle. They found it at a place they called Gravesend, on the sandy south shore of Long Island, just north of Coney Island. Kieft gave them a patent, but Canarsee raiders—possibly the same band that had just killed Anne Hutchinson—drove them away. The return of peace in 1645 brought them back, armed with a second patent from Kieft, and they soon had their town laid out for a second time.

Testifying to the links between Anabaptism and social egalitarianism, the Gravesend town plan was an unusual variation on the compact, open-field communities typical of New England. The village center—its ghost still visible 350 years later in the street pattern of modern Brooklyn—consisted of four squares or commons, each about four acres in extent and surrounded by ten house lots. Every male householder was assigned one of these house lots—twenty-three of the forty were distributed within the first year or two—as well as a hundred-acre farm or planter’s lot in the fields outside the village.

Other English settlers established Hempstead in 1644, and the following year eighteen English families founded Flushing. The irony of an English town named Flushing in New Netherland would have been lost on no one. Its namesake, Vlissingen, was one of the first towns in Holland to revolt against Spain. When the States-General appealed to Queen Elizabeth for military and financial assistance, Flushing-Vlissingen was one of two “cautionary” towns they allowed the English to occupy as a pledge of good faith. English forces held both for years, much as English settlers were now occupying towns in New Netherland.

Everywhere the West India Company’s directors looked, they seemed to be losing ground. A new round of fighting with Spain had gone badly, and the Portuguese were on the way to