Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [42]
4
Stuyvesant
But the West India Company didn’t abandon New Netherland. Instead, reasoning that it could be used to provision Brazil—and if Brazil were lost, that it might be the only Dutch possession of consequence in the New World—the company’s directors resolved to make another attempt to get the colony on its feet. Their first step was to find a man tough enough to ride herd on its turbulent inhabitants, and the obvious choice was a company veteran named Petrus Stuyvesant.
Stuyvesant came from Friesland, in the northern Netherlands, where his father, a Reformed clergyman, preached the stern, bellicose Calvinism of the Counter-Remonstrant party and the Synod of Dort. He enrolled in the University of Franeker at the age of twenty but was expelled two or three years later for seducing his landlord’s daughter. His father then sent him to Amsterdam, where he wangled a job with the West India Company and began to make something of himself (as “Petrus” rather than “Pieter” because the Latin form of his name showed that he had university training). In 1630 the company appointed young Stuyvesant its commercial agent on Fernando de Noronha, a tiny island off the coast of Brazil used for operations against the mainland. He was transferred to Pernambuco in 1635, and in 1638 the company moved him to Curacao, now its American headquarters and principal naval base in the Caribbean. In 1642, barely thirty years old, he became acting governor of Curacao, Aruba, and Bonaire.
Stuyvesant’s principal assignment on Curacao was to organize an expedition against the island of St. Martin. The Spanish had pried St. Martin away from the company some years earlier, and the Dutch sorely missed its valuable salt pans as well as its proximity to Puerto Rico, which had almost fallen to company forces in 1625 and remained an inviting target. In the early spring of 1644 Stuyvesant fell upon St. Martin with twelve ships and over a thousand men. When the Spaniards refused to surrender, he laid siege. He failed to prevent supplies getting through from Puerto Rico, however, and an enemy cannonball crushed his right leg. Surgeons amputated it just below the knee. Four weeks later, in excruciating pain, he called off the assault. Later that year he went home to the Netherlands to recuperate and get fitted for a wooden leg. It was, he always said, a sign that God had spared him for great things. The West India Company, for its part, hailed Stuyvesant’s peg-leg as a symbol of “Roman” sacrifice and named him director-general of New Netherland at the salary of three thousand guilders per year—fifty times the purchase price of Manhattan and twenty times the annual wages of a company sailor or seaman.
While waiting for the States-General to confirm his appointment, Stuyvesant married Judith Bayard, the daughter of a Huguenot clergyman from Breda. He and his bride left Amsterdam in December 1646. After a quick stop on Curacao, they reached New Amsterdam in August 1647.
The place was a wreck. Kieft’s “land-destroying and people-expelling wars with the cruel barbarians,” Stuyvesant later reported, had stripped the country of inhabitants, obliterated all but a handful of villages, and driven many settlers to head for home. Barely “250, or at farthest 300 men capable of bearing arms” remained in the entire colony. Around seven hundred people, still fearful of reoccupying their farms, cowered in makeshift huts around Fort Amsterdam, which “I found resembling more a mole-hill than a fortress, without gates, the walls and bastions trodden underfoot by men and cattle.” Kieft himself was holed up in his quarters counting all the money he had made—reportedly more than four hundred thousand