CHAPTER 7 Deep Down in Spirituality: Efforts of Seventeenth-Century New Netherlanders to Access God

Donna Merwick

On the last Friday in June, 1658, Governor Peter Stuyvesant was finishing off a report on his month-long visitation to Esopus (later Kingston, New York.) The settlement was home to sixty or seventy villagers who were farming and trading on land midway up the Hudson River between Manhattan Island and Beverwijck (later Albany, New York). Serious troubles had allegedly broken out with local natives, and the settlers were requesting military assistance from Stuyvesant, an officer who had served New Netherland as Director General for a decade and would continue to do so until 1664 when the province fell to the English and was renamed New York. On May 28, he had accepted his councillors’ advice to investigate the alle- gations and settle the matter amicably. On the same day, he assembled a bodyguard of sixty soldiers and left New Amsterdam (later New York City.) As was customary, he began a daily journal. The 4,500 words would constitute his report. I have read the journal many times. Stuyvesant logged his actions meticu- lously day by day. So I was, as it were, with him “On Monday, the 3rd of June, in the morning,” when he oversaw the digging of a moat where defensive pali- sades would be erected to enclose the village, “On the 13th, 14th and 15th” when he and his men commandeered the settlers to build a guardhouse, and “On the 25th, about noon” when he and his men embarked on a yacht and sailed for home (Fig. 7.1; map). In my reading-journeys with him, I realized that I was catching descriptions of his performances as he sought to bring order to the settlement and to its relationships with the natives. I valued it as a revealing account of how one set of natives and Europeans could get themselves so dangerously entangled

* I wish to express my gratitude to The University of Pennsylvania Press for allowing me to call upon ideas and material from my 2013 publication with them for use in this essay. I shared early chapters of Stuyvesant Bound: An Essay on Loss Across Time with Charles Zika. His inspi- ration carried me forward with the book, as it has in so many endeavours.

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figure 7.1 Map of New Netherland, circa 1660. Emily Brissenden Design.