The Island at the Center of the World (4 page)

Chapter 2

THE POLLINATOR

I
n the seventeenth century, to enter Amsterdam was to be softly assaulted in the senses. There was the squeal of caroming sea birds and the slap of oars; a stew of smells: cabbage, frying pancakes, the miasma of the canals. There was the sensation, on entering the ultramarine opacity of the canal grid, of gliding into an orderly enclosed space. The slender-bricked houses made an elegant but modest statement, their gabled tops framing and taming the sky. The cobbled quaysides were alive with workers wheeling barrows or wobbling under the strain of sacks being loaded into lighters. Women with billowing skirted bottoms scrubbed stoops and sprinkled them with fat handfuls of sand; everywhere there were dogs and horses and children.

As Henry Hudson arrived in Amsterdam in the autumn of 1608, the world around him was turning. The Spanish and Portuguese empires that had had their way with South America and the East Indies for more than a century were in decline, and two new powers were rising in tandem. 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.

The Dutch, of course, were of the sea; keeping it back was a way of life. Consequently, water was their orientation; they were the continent's shipbuilders, sailors, pilots, and traffickers, and this was their key to empire. When the union of Spain and Portugal in 1580 closed to Dutch traders the port of Lisbon (where they had long received Asian goods for resale throughout Europe), the Dutch merchants took the drastic step of stocking their vessels with gunpowder and cannonballs and going directly to the Iberian supply source, the islands of the East Indies, more than a year's journey away by the southern route. They arrived with guns blazing at the Portuguese military-trading posts there, and took them, converting Java, Sumatra, and the Malaysian peninsula into outposts of a new empire. When the first successful convoy returned home in 1599, its hulls packed with six hundred thousand pounds of pepper and an equal amount of nutmeg, cloves, and other spices, Amsterdammers were stunned at the plenitude. Churchbells throughout the city rang, and the rise to world power began.

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.
England was on the verge of a century of religious wars that would see royal heads roll and crowds of ordinary citizens flee. The Dutch—traders and sailors, whose focus was always
out there:
on other lands, other peoples, and their products—had always had to put up with differences. Just as foreign goods moved in and out of their ports, foreign ideas, and for that matter, foreign people, did as well. To talk about “celebrating diversity” is to be wildly anachronistic, but in the Europe of the time the Dutch stood out for their relative acceptance of foreignness, of religious differences, of odd sorts. One example of this could be found in Hudson's new employers, the men who made up the Amsterdam Chamber of the East India Company: Catholics and Protestants, many of them refugees from persecution in the south or elsewhere. They had come here, wedged themselves into society, and worked their way up. Over the course of the seventeenth century, the Dutch Republic would give intellectual or religious haven to Descartes, John Locke, and the English Pilgrims, the latter of whom lived in Leiden for twelve years before setting out to found a new Jerusalem in New England. The philosopher Baruch Spinoza was a product of Amsterdam's vigorous Jewish community. To this day, Amsterdammers' proud slang term for their city is
Mokum,
the centuries-old Jewish name for it. (For that matter, Amsterdam slang for “see you later” is the Yiddishism
de mazzel.
)

Landscape has a political dimension, too, and the low-lying provinces—the Netherlands is really one vast river delta—were always an easy target for invaders. The French expanded into them in the 1300s, then in 1495, three years after Columbus's voyage, Spain added the low countries to its empire. As Hudson entered Amsterdam, the United Provinces of the Netherlands had been fighting for independence from their Spanish overlords for nearly four decades, and the long war had toughened them, focused them, made them militarily and economically stronger. Before, they had been scattered, each province tending to go its own way. The Catholic tyranny of Spain—complete with bloody Inquisition tactics to force Protestants to return to the fold—united them. It gave them a Father of the Country in the person of Willem I, the Prince of Orange, known to history as William the Silent. The assassination of this heroic military leader gave Groningen farmers, Frisian horse traders, Zeeland shipwrights, and the cosmopolitan artists and merchants of Amsterdam a common focal point. They also had their own Minutemen, called the Sea Beggars, a scrappy, Robin Hood–like band of sailors who against all odds defeated the precision-drilled Spanish regulars who held the coastal town of Briel, taking the town and giving the Dutch their first hope of throwing off the foreign yoke.

Maybe the most striking difference between the Netherlands and England was that the new government the seven united Dutch provinces formed during their struggle was something utterly anomalous in Europe: in the midst of the great age of monarchies, stretching from Elizabeth Tudor to Louis XIV, the Dutch carved out a republic. It wasn't a republic in the full Enlightenment-era sense—it wasn't of the idealistic, self-righteously stubborn, “we hold these truths to be self-evident” model that gave rise to the American republic, but rather had come into being in a piecemeal way, as towns joined together to protect their interests. But it was a bottom-up system: it came from the people. The French had their intricately intertwined systems of fashion and protocol, the Spanish court its tottering “magnificent fountain” of patronage, and the English their class system, with an aristocracy rooted into the nation's soul. The Dutch of the seventeenth century distinguished themselves by being Regular Guys. They had a cultural distaste for monarchy and ostentation—as one writer of the time put it, a “strenuous spirit of opposition to a sovereign concentrated in one head.” They believed in hard work, in earning an honest guilder, in personal modesty. They thought the English preoccupation with witches was paranoia.

The Dutch dressed so simply that foreigners complained that on the streets of Amsterdam it was impossible to tell the difference between a city magistrate and a simple shopkeeper. In the early part of the century Amsterdam had few grand houses; the homes that lined the Herengracht and Brouwersgracht were still modest, single-family affairs. Fantastically for the time, the Dutch didn't believe in keeping fleets of servants: a wealthy family might have one or two. A French naval commander, boarding a Dutch frigate, was appalled to find its captain sweeping his own cabin. There were noble families, but they had nothing like the power held by other European aristocrats. Instead, power went to those who made things happen: businessmen and local magistrates. Over time, human nature being what it is, these men would create a kind of merchant nobility, sometimes even buying titles from cash-poor foreigners, but this in itself underscores the point. Upward mobility was part of the Dutch character: if you worked hard and were smart, you rose in stature. Today that is a byword of a healthy society; in the seventeenth century it was weird.

The whole package—the Founding Father, the young and vibrant republic, the war for independence, the hard-nosed, practical populace that disdains monarchies and maintains a frank acceptance of differences—has a ring of familiarity to it, which was not lost on the American founding fathers of the next century. As John Adams, in his capacity as the first American ambassador to the Netherlands, wrote in 1782: “The Originals of the two Republics are so much alike, that the History of one seems but a Transcript from that of the other; so that every Dutchman instructed in the subject, must pronounce the American revolution just and necessary, or pass a Censure upon the greatest Actions of his immortal Ancestors.” Some of those similarities are inevitable (don't all rebellions have heroes and martyrs?), but the most elemental one—a cultural sensibility that included a frank acceptance of differences and a belief that individual achievement matters more than birthright—is, as I hope this book will show, at least in part the result of a kind of genetic transfer from the one culture to the other, a planting of Dutch notions in one vital region of the future United States, from which they would be taken up into the American character. And the unlikely and unwitting carrier of this cultural gene was here, this man, in this place.

As with the English, the Dutch had had a long-standing interest in finding a northern route to Asia. Fifteen years earlier, the Dutch explorer Willem Barents had made three attempts at a northeast passage. That he froze to death on his last voyage didn't dull local enthusiasm for the project. The Dutch East India Company had sprung into being from the recent, extravagantly successful voyages to Southeast Asia, and would soon deploy a vast fleet with no fewer than five thousand sailors. It was better organized and had more money at its disposal than the Muscovy Company. If, as the company's intelligence reports had it, Hudson was on the verge of discovering the long-sought northern passage to Asian markets, they wanted Hudson.

But they weren't the only ones who wanted him. Hudson arrived in the Dutch Republic at a decisive moment, when all of Europe was focused on these low-lying provinces. Two years before, in a thicket of masts and gunpowder discharge and carnage, Dutch ships under Jacob van Heemskerck had blasted their way through the Spanish fleet as it lay moored off Gibraltar. This provided a coda to England's defeat of the Armada twenty years earlier, and finally brought the Spanish king, Philip III, to the bargaining table. While Hudson was sitting down to negotiate a contract with the Dutch merchants, representatives from all the nations of Europe were gathered thirty-five miles away at The Hague to hammer out a truce that all had a stake in. If a truce could be worked out, it would be tantamount to recognition of the United Provinces as a nation in its own right.

Hudson was comfortable in Holland; he may even have spent an earlier portion of his life in the country. He had friends here. Joost de Hondt was an engraver and mapmaker who acted as Hudson's interpreter in the contract negotiations; Hudson stayed at his house in The Hague through the winter. Another friend was the geographer Peter Plancius (he of the polar sun-power theory), with whom Hudson spent long evenings that winter, poring over maps and stray bits of information or hearsay. Plancius had the greatest knowledge of the shape of the world of any man in the Dutch provinces. He was one of those who believed that the route to Asia lay to the northeast, but Hudson was adamant that the most likely passage was to the northwest. He got further support for this belief from an item Plancius somehow had gotten his hands on and now furnished Hudson with: the journal of the Englishman George Weymouth, who had made detailed observations of his own attempt at the northwest route seven years earlier.

While Hudson sat at East India House overlooking the still, green water of the Gelderse Kade and negotiated with the Dutch merchants, spies from delegations to the truce negotiations at The Hague were listening in, for the two things were connected. The main issue of the conference was a truce, but the subtext was the rising Dutch power. The Spanish and Portuguese representatives were still fuming at the Dutch inroads in Asia and wanted these rolled back as a condition of peace. England felt the same. James I, the bookish and ungainly Scotsman who had replaced Elizabeth on the throne, had directed his representatives at The Hague negotiations to push for an end to Dutch trading in the East.

The VOC—as the Dutch East India Company would become known worldwide, the initials of its Dutch name,
de Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie,
emblazoned on ships in all ports of the world—had a charter that gave it a monopoly on Asian trade carried out via the southern route only. So if someone were to discover a northern back door to Asia, the company's rise to power would be halted. Hence the eagerness to get to Hudson. But before the VOC reached an agreement, others made a play for him. Pierre Jeannin, who headed the French delegation at the negotiations, dashed off a missive to King Henri IV, informing him of a development that had ramifications for the “present negotiations to obtain a truce for the States General.” There was word, Jeannin reported, the Dutch were about to close a deal with the English mariner Hudson, who was on the verge of discovering a short route to Asia. (Perpetuating the Plancius myth, Jeannin gossiped that Hudson “has found that the more northwards he went, the less cold it became.”) Jeannin put forth the plan of a renegade Dutch merchant named Isaac le Maire, who proposed stealing Hudson away from the VOC and signing him to a pact with a French-led consortium, and added, “there are also many rich merchants who will gladly join in.”

By now the English were angry that they had let go of Hudson. The Dutch merchants, meanwhile, got wind of the French activity, and it speeded them to sign a contract with the mariner. This frenzy of activity among the major European players heightens the notion of Hudson as a fulcrum: they all sensed this sailor was going somewhere
—
the future lay in his direction, and they wanted to follow him.

T
O SEA THEN,
launching from near the squat brick tower called the Schreierstoren, where the city walls fronted the water and where generations of Dutch women had stood gazing nervously out, waiting for their men to return. Hudson made it by spring, in time for the sailing season of 1609. He had a new ship, the eighty-five-foot
Halve Maen
(“Half Moon”), and a crew of sixteen, half English and half Dutch. He had orders, too: to find a north
eastern
route. He must have pushed strongly for the northwest, for they pushed back; in the accompanying instructions the Dutch merchants warned him “to think of discovering no other routes or passages” than the northeast. In his best fashion, he disobeyed them utterly. After taking a flier along the coast of Norway in the general direction of Russia, he went along with a gale blowing westward and then kept going. He was about to voyage three thousand miles in the opposite direction from what he had promised: inconceivable in another ship's captain; for him, pretty standard. Thus, his historic journey was truly of his own doing, even if its result was something beyond his intention.