The Island at the Center of the World

The Dutch were growing in might right alongside the English, and would peak sooner, giving the world Rembrandt, Vermeer, the microscope, the tulip, the stock exchange, and the modern notion of home as a private, intimate place. (Location 559)

Geography shapes character, and the character of the city Hudson entered was vastly different from the one he had just left. This single point helps to explain why Manhattan, which owes its originating contours to Hudson, would become such a different place from, say, Boston or Philadelphia. One difference between England and the Dutch Republic was contained in the abstract and to our ears wan-sounding noun tolerance. (Location 568)

Sailing silently into the inner harbor, approaching the southern tip of Manhattan Island, the ships glided into a reedy, marshy expanse of tidal wetland (the Mohawk name for Manhattan—Gänóno—translates as “reeds” or “place of reeds”), a complicated crossover region of freshwater and marine species, where bay, swamp forest, and serpentine barrens bred skying, cawing shore birds—plovers, sandpipers, dowitchers, yellowlegs—as well as thick populations of homebody mallards, and also drew migrating flocks of oldsquaws, mergansers, and wigeons that blackened the gray November sky. Mussels, conchs, clams, and periwinkles encrusted the estuaries, and most of all oysters, some of which, a settler wrote, are “quite large and occasionally containing a small pearl,” while others were tiny and sweet and another variety was “fine for stewing and frying. As each one fills a big spoon they make a good bite.” Rising up above the island’s reedy shoreline were oak and chestnut forests and hills populated by wolves, mountain lions, and black bear. (Location 864)

Note: Fun that suck a diverse culture of people was built on such a diverse ecological and geographic base

SO HE BOUGHT it. Everyone knows that. Peter Minuit purchased Manhattan Island from a group of local Indians for sixty guilders worth of goods, or as the nineteenth-century historian Edmund O’Callaghan calculated it, twenty-four dollars. (Location 1005)

He was now in the midst of what would become known as the Personal Rule, the eleven-year period in which, having dismissed Parliament because it quarreled with him, he governed on his own. During this time he would grow steadily isolated from his country, the court becoming more insular and the king’s spending and partying progressively more lavish, as members of Parliament fumed and the masses moved toward open rebellion. It would end with his worst nightmare coming true: revolt, and his beheading. (Location 1336)

The island spawned taverns and breweries with remarkable speed—at one point (Location 1622)

in the early years one-quarter of its buildings were devoted to making or selling alcohol. (Location 1623)

In 1640 the company gave up its monopoly on trade in the region, which had kept the place from developing in any areas except piracy and smuggling, and declared New Netherland a free trading zone. In this new free-market territory, New Amsterdam would be the “staple port,” the hub through which traders’ and merchants’ ships would pass, where they would pay duties and be cleared for travel. The effect was electric. Small-scale entrepreneurs in Amsterdam who were willing to brave the hazards of the ocean voyage now had, in Manhattan, a hub to exploit—a base around which the circle of Atlantic trade could turn. (Location 1958)

Dutch global expansion during its century of empire was built around not settlement colonies but outposts, which explains why, even though the empire extended as far afield as India, Taiwan, and Java, the Dutch language is not spread around the globe the way English is. (Location 2097)

It seems remarkable that, still in his early twenties, having traveled an ocean away from the only world he had known, he immediately set to defying his patron, a man universally feared and respected as a kind of latter-day medieval prince. “Most honorable, wise, powerful, and right discreet Lord” is how people addressed letters to Van Rensselaer. Van der Donck, by contrast, in his first act on arrival at Rensselaerswyck angered Van Rensselaer by rejecting the farm set aside for him and taking another, at the far end of the colony. He then chose one of the patroon’s prized black stallions as his personal mount. (Location 2460)

Note: American swagger

If an opponent remained obstinate, eventually “one of the younger chiefs will jump up and in one fell swoop smash the man’s skull with an axe in full view of everyone.” Van der Donck was forced to conclude that this species of popular government was “defective and lame.” (Location 2540)