Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [62]
New Amersfoort (Flatlands), the oldest Dutch village on the periphery of New Amsterdam, came closest to fulfilling Stuyvesant’s expectations. Its few dozen residents—Schencks and Strykers, Van Sigelens and Van Kouwenhovens—lived close by one another in palisaded farmhouses near the intersection of Flatbush Avenue and Kings Highway, not far from where Andries Hudde and Wolphert Gerritsen first broke ground in the mid-1630s. Breuckelen, chartered by Kieft in 1646, was somewhat larger and less well defended. Dominie Henricus Selyns, who arrived there in 1660 to preach the gospel, counted 134 people in thirty-one households, predominately Dutch, scattered along what is now Fulton Street, not far from the ferry landing—“an ugly little village with the church in the middle of the road,” he said.
In 1651 Stuyvesant set out to organize a new settlement in the thickly wooded land between Breuckelen and New Amersfoort. He christened it Middlewout, or Midwout; to its residents and neighbors it was also known as Vlachte Bos (Flatbush). Land was distributed to settlers, and in 1654 they received a formal charter permitting them to choose their own magistrates, to raise taxes, to build a church and school, and to provide for their common defense.
Despite Stuyvesant’s repeated demands and warnings, the residents of Midwout stubbornly refused to live near one another, as did the English or their New Amersfoort neighbors. After much argument, he ordered them to lay out forty-odd plots of about fifty acres each along an Indian trail (now Flatbush Avenue) that ran down from Breuckelen to Jamaica Bay. Where Church Avenue now crosses Flatbush Avenue, he had them build a stockade and blockhouse as well as a small house of worship for the village’s first dominie, the Rev. Johannes Polhemus, who arrived in 1654 from Brazil.
In 1652, the year after creating Midwout, Stuyvesant permitted fifty-odd English Independents and Presbyterians to settle west of Flushing Creek near Mespat Kill. He called the place Middelburgh after the capital of Zeeland; they called it Newtown. The West India Company didn’t want them there under any name, however, for with war looming between Parliament and the States-General, the English settlements in New Netherland looked too much like “serpents in our bosom, who finally might devour our hearts.” Stuyvesant realized his mistake when Middleburgh joined Gravesend, Hempstead, and Flushing in the clamor against him. In retaliation, he reneged on his promise to give Middleburgh a charter and slammed the door on further English settlements in the colony.
Stuyvesant’s settlement-building program very nearly came to grief when he turned his attention to New Sweden, a colony of four-hundred-odd fur traders and tobacco planters on the western flank of New Netherland. For a dozen years the West India Company had done little or nothing to dislodge the Swedes, but after 1650 they became more troublesome, building new trading posts along the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers and harassing Dutch merchants. Stuyvesant vowed to erase New Sweden from the map, and in the autumn of 1655 he descended on the Delaware community with four heavily armed ships and several hundred soldiers. The Swedes gave up without firing a shot.
There was no time to celebrate, however, for bad news had arrived from New Amsterdam. In Stuyvesant’s absence, nearly two thousand Hackensacks, Mahicans, Wappingers, and assorted other “river Indians” came down the Hudson to raid Canarsee camps on Long Island. While gathering food and water on Manhattan, one of their women was killed by a Dutchman for taking peaches from his orchard. That night, enraged Indians poured into town, hammering on doors, ransacking houses, and terrifying the residents. Though no one was seriously injured, the panicky burgomasters, urged on by Secretary Van Tienhoven, organized a militia and drove