World Affairs
The flower of New Amsterdam. What made New York the vibrant, liberal place it is today - and the epitome of western arrogance and greed? It wasn't the English influence but the city's brief, often overlooked period as a Dutch colony that gave Manhattan its eclectic soul
Published 08 March 2004
The Island at the Centre of the World: the untold story of Dutch Manhattan and the founding of New York
Russell Shorto Doubleday, 432pp, £18.99
ISBN 038560324X
When the terrorist chieftains determined upon their principal objective for 11 September 2001, they chose allegorically. The World Trade Center was an iconic emblem of American wealth, power and arrogance, but the island of Manhattan behind it epitomised contemporary western civilisation itself, in all its frenzy of variety, tolerance, gaiety, greed, sexuality, creativity and free-for-all - the very antithesis of everything bigots and dogmatists prefer.
How the island achieved this equivocal pre-eminence is the subject of Russell Shorto's remarkable book. It took a few centuries for Manhattan to reach the legendary pinnacle of its success - at the end of the Second World War, say, when it had no rival and stood "beyond envy", as was once said of Venice. Shorto contends, however, that its essential character was established in the very first decades of its European settlement, as the Dutch town of New Amsterdam, capital of New Netherland, in the 1600s.
When in 1609 Henry Hudson first sailed into its harbour, on behalf of the Dutch East India Company, the Pilgrims had already founded New England in the north, and there was another, fancier English colony in Virginia, to the south. Manhattan, however, was something different. Geographically, it was made to be the prime American seaport, standing as it did on the great Hudson River, which was the easiest way inland. Economically, it was perfectly placed for entrepot trading. Temperamentally, it was Dutch, not English, with Dutch ideas so liberal that in no time less rigidly Puritan families from Massachusetts were deserting to the pluralist embrace of New Netherland.
It is Shorto's thesis, developed through more than 400 compulsively interesting pages, that Manhattan never looked back. Everyone knows that the English soon turned New Netherland into New York, and its only citizen most of us have ever heard of was the one-legged last Dutch governor, Peter Stuyvesant - "Peg-Leg Pete". But Shorto argues that during the brief decades of its Dutch colonial existence the infant Manhattan had already found, once and for all, its tumultuously eclectic soul. Osama Bin Laden would have targeted it from the start.
Almost at once, for one thing, it became multi-ethnic, multi-faith, multilingual and generally multi-everything. At a time when the English colonies were all too English, in one kind or another, Dutch Manhattan was your archetypal melting pot. It is true that its people did not wish to break away from their distant mother country, as the English presently would, but they did very soon agitate for proper municipal status, free trade and representative local government. Their ultimate masters, back in Europe, were not the courtly acolytes of a divine-right monarchy, but merchant burghers in a state halfway to republicanism.
Then again, Manhattan very soon spawned the political conflicts that were to be endemic to the place, and Stuyvesant's most persistent enemy in the colony, Adriaen van der Donck, is central to the book. Unknown to most conventional histories of Manhattan (hardly mentioned, for example, in Burrows and Wallace's immense Gotham, and not mentioned at all in Kenneth T Jackson's Encyclopaedia of New York City), he was a recognisable Manhattanite already: a radical lawyer, clever, cultivated, unremitting, rather like a conspiracy theorist 350 years later, and similarly obsessed - in his case with the struggle for popular government, which he eventually won, bequeathing his victory to the English who came later.
Manhattan has never been an easy place, and its Dutch settlers certainly had troubles enough. For a start, there were the local Indians, with whom relations fluctuated from the neighbourly to the massacrous. There were the nearby English colonists, who were bound to seize Manhattan in the end, and did (although for a year or two the Dutch seized it back again). And there were the merchant venturers from Sweden who founded their own New Sweden bang next door to New Netherland, on the coast of Delaware, and made an insolent nuisance of themselves.
It was a confusing delivery, the birth of Manhattan. Shorto brings it wonderfully to life in a narrative marred only by lapses into a dated sort of journalese (rains don't fall, they "slant", paddles "knife" the water, and at one point poor Stuyvesant finds himself "shoved between the shoulder blades by the forces of history"). The research has clearly been formidable, vastly enhanced by almost indecipherable Dutch archives that the scholar Charles Gehring of Albany has spent the past 30 years translating, and the result is a book that New York aficionados will find fuels their enthusiasm.
Any English among them must beware, for Russell Shorto is evidently no Anglophile. Faced in this narrative by the down-to-earth Dutch, the fancier Britons usually come off second best, and though the hearts of Englishmen may stir momentarily when they read of Admiral Robert Blake ("flowing-haired, Oxford-educated son of wealth") confronting Maarten Tromp ("leathery, pug-like . . . of humble origins"), Shorto never reaches the end of the rivalry, when at the Battle of Scheveningen in 1653 Blake knocked off Admiral Tromp himself as well as 4,000 of his sailors.
But, on the whole, the English contribution to this tale is not inspiring, and perfidious Albion is often around - the circumstances of the final takeover were notoriously dubious. Shorto thinks that if the English had seized Manhattan any earlier, New York would have become just another port town like Boston, "and American culture would never have developed as it did". As it was, he believes that the "manifest destiny" syndrome, which has led the Americans so inexorably into universal dominance, sprang not from the values of Dutch Manhattan, but from the conviction of the English Puritans that God had sent them to their New World to save all humanity by their example - President Wilson's "light of the world".
Shorto is at pains, all the same, to correct the misconception that New Amsterdam left behind nothing, and to demonstrate that the memory of it has been unfairly tainted by English prejudice and derogatory 17th-century idioms - Dutch courage, Dutch treat, going Dutch, a Dutch bargain. Why, don't we realise that coleslaw was originally koolsla, cabbage salad; that cookies began life as koeckjes, little cakes; that a boss was originally a Dutch baas? Do we suppose that the Roosevelts or the Vanderbilts came from Surrey?
Yonkers was originally the property of Adriaen van der Donck, commonly known as de jonker (or yonkheer) - meaning young squire. The Bronx belonged to Jonas Bronck. Santa Claus came to America by way of New Amsterdam, and so did that all- American folk figure, the district attorney. Most important of all, it was that intangible Dutch legacy, the all-accepting, bloody-minded spirit of individual liberty, inherited down the centuries, that was to make Manhattan a fateful paradigm of our times.
Still, I suspect those strategists of doom may have been too late when they directed their agents into the New York flight path. The flower that the Dutchmen planted in New Amsterdam had grown blowsy by 2001, the civilisation Manhattan epitomised was already in obese decline, and Bin Laden might just as well have left its fate to hubris - that is to say, to manifest destiny itself.
Jan Morris's most recent book is A Writer's World: travels 1950-2000 (Faber & Faber)
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