QI The Book of the Dead

the couple went on to have a pair of sons.
    Once better, Stuyvesant reported for duty at the West India Company’s offices in Amsterdam. He had an expensive state-ofthe-art wooden leg, and a cheap spare one for emergencies. It was a scene from a seventeenth-century version of The Terminator – the wounded soldier returns, older, wiser, more focused, his false limb glinting with the silver nails used to reinforce it. Here was the complete company man. The directors were impressed. They gave Stuyvesant a new mission: to impose order on the unruly colony of New Netherland on the east coast of North America.
    As director-general of the settlement, based in the capital, New Amsterdam, Stuyvesant diligently looked after the Company’s interests for the best part of sixteen years. He was a shrewd negotiator: tough, uncompromising and fair, holding off threats from the Swedes and the Native Americans and even managing for a while to get the New Englanders to accept Dutch sovereignty. In the end though, it all came to nothing. And, as it is the victors who decide what history gets taught in school, very few people today have heard of New Netherland, and if they’ve heard of Pieter Stuyvesant at all, they know only that he wasDutch and had a wooden leg. This is most unfair.
    New Netherland was a colony of over 10,000 people. Unlike most of Puritan New England, it wasn’t founded on religious grounds. It was primarily a trading centre, infused with the liberal outlook that made the Netherlands the financial and intellectual powerhouse of the seventeenth century. As a result, it was a melting pot of nationalities and mixed marriages. New Amsterdam was to become New York, but its heart – and tongue – remains Dutch. Many words we consider uniquely American are in fact adopted from Dutch: ‘boss’ for master, cookies, coleslaw, even Santa Claus. It was the Dutch who erected the defensive wall that became ‘Wall’ Street; Stuyvesant’s farm or bouwerie is now The Bowery, one of the city’s most famous thoroughfares; even Broadway (built by Stuyvesant) is merely the English pronunciation of Breede weg . The homesteads of New Amsterdam – Nieuw Haarlem, Breukelen, Greenwyck, Bronck’s Plantation, Jonker’s Plantation – all survive in the names of modern New York’s boroughs: Harlem, Brooklyn, Greenwich, the Bronx and Yonkers.
    This last was originally a sawmill on the Hudson River, named after its owner Jonkheer van der Donck. Adriaen van der Donck was a young lawyer and landowner and Jonkheer was his honorific title (it means ‘Young Gentleman’, roughly equivalent to The Hon. in English). He had studied at the University of Leiden, where complete religious freedom and lack of censorship were the order of the day, and he was steeped in the new learning of Galileo, Descartes and Spinoza. Arriving in America in 1641, he had immediately fallen in love with the country: the landscape, plants, animals and most of all, the languages and customs of the local Mohican and Mohawk tribes. Recognisingearly on the importance of beavers to the fledging economy he kept them himself as pets and studied every aspect of their life cycle. He saw New Netherland as a place of almost endless possibility, where laws and governance could be founded on the principles of peace and co-operation between peoples. In the passion he brought to his task of recording and mapping the colony, one can detect the first glimmering of the ideas that led to America’s independence over a century later.
    Stuyvesant’s predecessor as director-general, Willem Kleft, had been very unpopular with the colonists. Against van der Donck’s peaceful principles, he had started a bloody Indian war that drained the colony’s resources and made outlying areas dangerous. Van der Donck used his oratorical skills to oppose Kleft and lobby for his replacement. When Stuyvesant arrived in 1647, van der Donck was appointed ‘President of the Commonality’, effectively Stuyvesant’s deputy. The two men at first got on well, but the new director-general was easier to admire than to like. Unlike Adriaen van der Donck, he was a deeply conservative man who had no time for anything other than the iron laws of God and their earthly manifestation, the Dutch West India Company. He was an autocrat, referring to his fellow citizens as ‘subjects’ or ‘his children’ and winning arguments, not by subtle legal niceties, but by shouting, swearing and stamping his wooden