QI The Book of the Dead

hasn’t been kind to Pieter Stuyvesant (1612–72), thelast Dutch governor of what we now call New York. Ask an American what they know about him and they will probably tell you he had a wooden leg. The football team at New York’s Stuyvesant High School are still called ‘the Peg-leggers’ and grumpy, stubborn Peg-Leg Pete is seen as, at best, a bit-part player in the long drama of the nation, an irrelevant prologue before the main act gets under way. In Washington Irving’s satirical Knickerbocker’s History of New York (1809), Stuyvesant is described as ‘a tough, sturdy, valiant, weather-beaten, mettlesome, obstinate, leathern-sided, lion-hearted, generous-spirited old governor’. By 1938 this rather admiring portrait had given way to the repressive proto-fascist of the musical Knickerbocker’s Holiday by Kurt Weill and Maxwell Andersen. In the one number from the show that’s become a classic, Stuyvesant’s character gets to sing the bittersweet ‘September Song’.
    Stuyvesant’s real life was more bitter than sweet. He came from Friesland in the flat northlands of the Netherlands, an area of devout peasants and grim-faced ultra-conformity. His father was a minister in the Dutch Reformed Church and Pieter’s obvious career path was to follow him there. But the young Stuyvesant rebelled, choosing to study philosophy rather than theology and getting himself kicked out of university for sleeping with his landlord’s daughter. He immediately joined the Dutch West India Company as a clerk, rising quickly through the ranks, until he was appointed the director of the Caribbean colony of Curaçao in 1642, just before his thirtieth birthday.
    Stuyvesant was ambitious, single-minded and charismatic, gathering a string of acolytes around him. The most dedicated of these was John Farret, a fellow West India Company employee and an accomplished painter and poet. For many years, the twomen enjoyed a diverting correspondence conducted entirely in verse. Farret hero-worshipped Stuyvesant, referring to him as ‘Excellency’ and ‘My Stuyvesant’ and calling Stuyvesant’s own rather clunky verses ‘godlike’. These letters (which only came to light in the 1920s) have a faint flavour of homoeroticism about them, though there is no suggestion of any sexual liaison. They put a fresh slant on Stuyvesant’s dour and crusty image, rather like discovering Oliver Cromwell had a camp Cavalier pen pal.
    Stuyvesant was two years into his Caribbean appointment when, during an ill-advised expedition to recapture the island of St Martin from the Spanish, his leg was blown off. He was flamboyantly planting the Dutch flag on a rampart that his troops had thrown up on the beach when a cannon ball fired from the island’s fort shattered his right shin. That he lived to tell the tale indicates his considerable resilience. Dutch doctors were the most advanced in Europe and ingenious in devising new techniques of amputation, but none of these was easy or pleasant. Speed was of the essence. Fat and muscle had to be cut away to create a skin flap, and the bone sawn through as quickly as possible. Some surgeons could manage the whole procedure in less than a minute, but the survival rate was less than one in three.
    Whoever saved Stuyvesant did an excellent job, but the patient was delirious for several weeks afterwards. He got back to his desk as soon as he could, his first act being a letter of apology to the directors of the company, regretting that his attack ‘did not succeed so well as had hoped, no small impediment having been the loss of my right leg, it being removed by a rough ball’. He then dashed off a poetical note to Farret who responded with his own attempt, ‘On the Off-Shot Leg of the Noble, Brave Heer Stuyvesant, Before the Island of St Marten’. Even by Farret’sfulsome standards, the poem hit new heights of Stuyvesant idolatry: ‘The bullet hits his leg; the rebound touches my heart…’
    Despite his determination to carry on as normal, the heat of the tropics meant Stuyvesant’s wound began to fester and he was reluctantly forced to return home to recuperate properly. His nursemaid was the plain but good-hearted spinster Judith Bayard, three years his senior and his brother-in-law’s sister. When he announced his intention to marry her, Farret goaded him by suggesting the marriage would never be consummated because Stuyvesant wasn’t up to the job. Stuyvesant’s verse in response was defiant and