THE
ISLAND AT THE
CENTER OF THE WORLD
The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan, the Forgotten Colony that Shaped
America
By Russell Shorto
Illustrated. 367 pp. New York:
Doubleday. $27.50
By Kevin Baker
Kevin Baker is the author of the historical novels “Dreamland”
and “Paradise Alley.”
“And
as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away
until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered
once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh green breast
of the new world,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote on the greatest
last page in American letters. On the grounds of Jay Gatsby’s
abandoned Long Island estate, Nick Carraway broods over the “transitory
enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence
of this continent…face to face for the last time in history
with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder”—before
he lets himself be borne back to the Midwest, along “the
dark fields of the republic.”
And
yet, Henry Hudson’s entrance into New York harbor has never
gained full, iconic status in the American experience. When it
comes to the old Dutch colony of New Netherland and its capital,
New Amsterdam, which took root on Manhattan island in 1624, we
tend to accept at face value Washington Irving’s comic Knickerbocker
caricatures, depicting a bunch of fat, bumptious graspers—sort
of a colony full of overgrown hobbits. Surely such a people could
not have contributed anything to the national character remotely
approaching the influence of, say, those dour Puritans up in Massachusetts.
Russell
Shorto, in his masterful new history, The Island at the Center
of the World, begs to differ. A regular contributor to the
New York Times Magazine whose last book, Gospel Truth,
was on the search for the historical Jesus, Shorto has taken up
nearly as intrepid a pursuit here, claiming that in fact, “If
what made America great was its ingenious openness to different
cultures, the small triangle of land at the southern tip of Manhattan
Island is the New World birthplace of that idea, the spot where
it first took shape…this island-city would become the first
multiethnic, upwardly mobile society on America’s shores,
a prototype of the kind of society that would be duplicated throughout
the country and around the world.”
New Netherland was supposed to be just one more in a series of
trading posts that the audacious new Dutch Republic was germinating
around the world, a private fiefdom of the Dutch West India Company
designed to pump more wealth into the extraordinary cultural and
economic boom then transforming the mother country. But somehow,
as Shorto puts it, “New Netherland refused to remain a trading
post. It was unique among the waystations of the Dutch empire
in that it insisted on becoming a place”—and
one that seemed almost magnetically drawn to the center of world
events. From its very inception, New Amsterdam was a remarkably
restless, ambitious, polyglot little seaport—“It was
Manhattan, in other words, right from the start…”
What
Shorto has hit upon is nothing less than the true dichotomy at
the heart of the American story, the fact that most of our ancestors
came to this land for material as well as idealistic reasons (To
properly recognize the experience of African-Americans, people
brought here against their will, one must actually make it a tryptich,
but that is another story.). Both motivations were complex. While
Shorto concedes the innate “messiness” of colonial
Manhattan, a place where at one point a quarter of all buildings
were devoted to the production or consumption of alcohol, religious
dissenters flocked to the Dutch colony to escape persecution up
on Massachusetts Bay. Meanwhile, the Puritans’ “shining
‘city on a hill’ became Manifest Destiny, and morphs
easily into a cheap battle cry.”
A
new foundation myth requires a new progenitor. The Dutch Republic
was nearing the end of an eighty-year war for national independence
and religious freedom, and while “tolerance” at the
time meant something closer to “Putting up with” than
“celebrating diversity,” the Dutch had developed a
very modern appreciation of free thought, epitomized by the fact
that this remarkable little country published an estimated one-half
of all the world’s books over the course of the seventeenth
century.
Yet
it is one thing to describe the cultural golden age of the nation
which spawned New Amsterdam, and another to prove its influence
upon the realized American nation. Shorto centers his story on
the battle between two critical players in Dutch Manhattan, Pieter
Stuyvesant and Adrien Van der Donck. Stuyvesant, the wily, flinty,
irascible soldier who had lost a leg fighting for the Company
on St. Marten’s, was mainly concerned with thwarting both
the encroachments of the expansionary New England colonies to
the north, and the demands for self-government from his feisty
subjects within. Van der Donck is a less well-known but even more
intriguing figure; a lawyer with the soul of a poet, punctilious
enough to attach eight footnotes to a single sentence, but also
a man capable of living for months among the Indians, and who
kept breaking into rapturous descriptions of the New World in
his neglected classic, A Description of New Netherland.
Van
der Donck’s quest to remake New Netherland in the republican
image of the mother country set him inevitably in opposition to
Stuyvesant. Ultimately, both men’s aims would be frustrated
but their conflict forced the West India Company to grant the
colony a charter, under which most citizens of New Amsterdam came
to enjoy nearly unprecedented rights and freedoms, living as real
stakeholders in an opportunity society. These liberties would
survive the English takeover of the colony in 1664, and Shorto
convincingly traces a direct line from their achievement straight
to the New York state legislature’s decision in 1787 not
to ratify the Constitution unless “a bill of specific individual
rights were attached to it.”
This
is an epic story, and for all of Shorto’s need to concentrate
on Manhattan and the Hudson Valley, he tells it in epic fashion,
making frequent, deft excursions from New York to Holland and
England, Brazil and Curacao, and the slave coast of Guinea; to
the Spice Islands, and the German battlefields of the Thirty Years’
War—and to Hartford, and Boston, and that hotly contested
colonial prize…New Jersey. He portrays a formidable cast
of historical actors—the cunning, murderous fanatic who
was Cromwell; the Stuarts, with all their dogs and horses and
mistresses. Poor Henry Hudson, so caught up in his quest for the
Northwest Passage that he was still asking “What do you
mean by this?” when his starving, freezing sailors finally
set him and his young son adrift in a small boat, in the bay that
would come to bear his name.
New
York history buffs will be captivated by Shorto’s descriptions
of Manhattan in its primordial state, of bays full of salmon and
oysters, and blue plums and fields of wild strawberries in what
is now Midtown. Here the reader may learn, among many other historical
tidbits, what the Dutch really paid for Manhattan (it wasn’t
$24); or the key role that Flushing (!) played in securing freedom
of conscience, or why the Knicks wear blue-and-orange uniforms;
or how Yonkers, Wall Street, the Spanish Main, the Bowery, the
Hutchinson River and Saw Mill parkways, Greenwich Village, Staten
Island, Cape May, and Nassau and Suffolk counties got their names.
Yet Shorto never overwhelms one with trivia, and he writes at
all times with passion, verve, nuance, and considerable humor.
If
there is a flaw in The Island at the Center of the World,
it may be Shorto’s underplaying of how the patroon system—a
semi-feudal arrangement the West India Company allowed to be grafted
onto its holdings—undermined democracy in upstate New York
even well into the nineteenth century. Yet overall, Shorto’s
basic premise is undeniable. The legacy of tolerance from the
Dutch colony in Manhattan would be extended, as he writes, “into
the very heart of the continent, crossroads settlements transformed
into cities, lights winking on in the dusk of the endless landscape,
each with its cluster of founding ethnic groups: Toledo, Cleveland,
Detroit, Buffalo, Milwaukee, Chicago, Green Bay”—very
deep into the dark fields of the republic, indeed.
©
Copyright The
New York Times
