In 1642, a pregnant, young woman ran away from her service at Rensselaerswyck ”” an estate founded by diamond merchant Kiliaen van Rensselaer outside what is now Albany ”” to New Amsterdam on the tip of Manhattan Island. Although he lived in Amsterdam, Van Rensselaer, a founding member of the Dutch West India Co., micromanaged his land and workers from across the Atlantic. Indeed, he had hired a young, up-and-coming lawyer to help with this very purpose.
Part sheriff as well, the lawyer set out for New Amsterdam, where he found the woman and brought her to court at Fort Amsterdam. As Russell Shorto wrote in “The Island at the Center of the World” (Doubleday, 2004), his absorbing history of Dutch Manhattan, the lawyer “demanded” that the woman honor her service contract. But he also allowed her to stay in Manhattan until she gave birth and the baby was old enough to travel.
This did not sit well with Van Rensselaer, who bellowed by letter across the ocean: “It is your duty to seek my advantage and protect me against loss.”
What man had the courage and compassion to stand up to such a boss in an age that we think of as so much less enlightened than our own?
The man was Adriaen Cornilessen van der Donck, and he just may be the most important American you never heard of. Explorer, writer and all-around drumbeater for North America, Van der Donck would also give his name to the city of Yonkers.
“”¦He was, as his writings make plain, one of the first genuine Americans,” Shorto wrote in his book. “He was so not because of where he came to live, but because of the expanse of opportunity that opened inside his breast once he arrived ”” opportunity he imagined not for himself alone but for others.”
Courtesy the Library of Congress”™ Geography & Map Division.
Traditionally, the early Dutch were known for their relative open-mindedness. They espoused a policy of religious toleration and a concept of half-slavery in which a slave could eventually buy his freedom, though not necessarily that of his wife and children. Van der Donck would embrace the best of the Dutch traditions. Born in Breda in the southern Netherlands, he came from a well-to-do family that had fought back Spanish dominance, earning a doctorate in civil and canon law at the University of Leiden, an intellectual center.
Van Rensselaer thought he was just the man to serve as schout, prosecutor/sheriff, on his New World holdings. But Van der Donck, arriving on The Oak Tree in 1641, soon proved to be more interested in the rough-and-tumble land and its people. Selecting one of Van Rensselaer”™s finer farms and horses for himself, he plumbed a terrain teeming with forests and wildlife and engaged with a populace that was already a polyglot of Dutch, Germans, Swedes, Jews, Quakers and Native Americans, speaking 18 languages. Van der Donck plunged into the culture of the Mahicans and Mohawks, eating their food and learning their languages. (Van der Donck was still a man of his time, advocating for Christian schools for the indigenous peoples ”” a practice that we now know has proved ruinous for them.)
Van Rensselaer was not interested in Van der Donck”™s anthropological wanderings and attempts to set himself up as a landowner, and did not renew his contract in 1644. This freed Van der Donck to immerse himself in the political unrest of New Amsterdam, where the Dutch West India Co.-appointed director-general Willem Kieft had colonists outraged with his ham-fisted approach to trade, taxation and relations with the native peoples. Van der Donck was able to smooth negotiations with the Native Americans, for which a grateful Kieft gave him 24,000 acres north of Manhattan that now includes Yonkers. There he built mills along the Saeck Kill ”” later the Nepperhan River and now the Saw Mill River. So expansive was this Colen Donck property that Van der Donck ”” who by this time, 1646, had married the Englishwoman Mary Doughty ”” became known as the jonkheer, or “young lord.” From that honorific comes the name “Yonkers.”
Still, colonial mismanagement reigned, and Van der Donck, as a member of the colony”™s Dutch-style citizens”™ board of Nine Men, became its leading advocate for a more representative, Dutch-style government, clashing with Kieft and his successor, the martinet Peter Stuyvesant. Always an adroit spokesman, Van der Donck was able to plead his case for more liberal governance successfully in Amsterdam, with his pamphlet “Remonstrance of New Netherland.” But the Anglo-Dutch War of 1652 and the Dutch West India Co.”™s maneuverings dashed his dream and kept him from returning to New Amsterdam immediately. Still, he continued to market the colony with the wildly popular “Description of New Netherland” (1655), which Charles T. Gehring, director of the New Netherland Institute, has hailed as “the fullest account of the province, its geography, the Indians who inhabited it and its prospects ”¦ It has been said that had it not been written in Dutch, it would have gone down as one of the great works of American colonial literature.”
The price the company exacted in 1653 for allowing Van der Donck to return to his beloved New Netherland and his family was the silencing of his voice. Stripped of his board membership and law license, he died at home some three years later.
“At worst, he has been branded arrogant and selfish, thinking only of his own ambitions,” J. van den Hoot wrote in “Adriaen van der Donck: A Dutch Rebel in Seventeenth Century America.” “At best, he has been labeled a hero, a visionary and a spokesman for the people.”
