Fulfilling God's Mission
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Ful lling God’s Mission FRIJHOFF_f1_i-xxviii.indd i 8/15/2007 3:27:54 PM The Atlantic World Europe, Africa and the Americas, 1500–1830 Editors Wim Klooster Clark University Benjamin Schmidt University of Washington VOLUME XIV FRIJHOFF_f1_i-xxviii.indd ii 8/15/2007 3:27:55 PM Ful lling God’s Mission The Two Worlds of Dominie Everardus Bogardus, 1607–1647 by Willem Frijhoff Translated by Myra Heerspink Scholz LEIDEN • BOSTON 2007 FRIJHOFF_f1_i-xxviii.indd iii 8/15/2007 3:27:55 PM This book is printed on acid-free paper. On the cover: Young orphan reading the Bible before dinner. Detail of the Ceremonial meal at the town orphanage of Oudewater, 1651. Oil painting on canvas by H. van Ommen. [Photograph by the author]. The translation of this book was made possible by a grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scienti c Research (NWO). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Frijhoff, Willem. [Wegen van Evert Willemsz. English] Ful lling God’s mission : the two worlds of Dominie Everardus Bogardus, 1607–1647 / by Willem Frijhoff ; translated by Myra Heerspink Scholz. p. cm. — (The Atlantic world ; v. 14) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-16211-2 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Bogaert, Evert Willemsz., 1607–1647. 2. Clergy—Netherlands—Biography. 3. Dutch Americans—New York (State)—New York—History—17th century. 4. New York (N.Y.)—Social life and cus- toms—To 1775. I. Title. II. Series. BX4705.B547F7513 2007 284’.2092—dc22 [B] 2007031997 ISSN 1570-0542 ISBN 978 90 04 16211 2 © Copyright 2007 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands FRIJHOFF_f1_i-xxviii.indd iv 8/15/2007 3:27:55 PM For Sabine and Laia FRIJHOFF_f1_i-xxviii.indd v 8/15/2007 3:27:55 PM FRIJHOFF_f1_i-xxviii.indd vi 8/15/2007 3:27:55 PM CONTENTS Preface ......................................................................................... ix Conventions ................................................................................ xvii Abbreviations .............................................................................. xix List of Illustrations ...................................................................... xxiii PROLOGUE A little spiritual song ................................................................... 3 The mystical experience ............................................................. 7 PART ONE VOCATION Chapter One A child without parents .................................... 41 Chapter Two Evert’s world ...................................................... 76 Chapter Three An orphan in Woerden .................................. 115 Chapter Four Words, sounds, images ...................................... 153 Chapter Five Election .............................................................. 181 Chapter Six Body language ..................................................... 204 Chapter Seven Deliverance ..................................................... 235 Chapter Eight Recognition ...................................................... 263 INTERMEZZO REACHING MATURITY Chapter Nine Comforter of the sick in Mouri ....................... 287 FRIJHOFF_f1_i-xxviii.indd vii 8/15/2007 3:27:55 PM viii contents PART TWO MISSIONS Chapter Ten A minister in Manhattan ................................... 319 Chapter Eleven A New Netherland family ............................. 364 Chapter Twelve Confrontations .............................................. 413 Chapter Thirteen War ............................................................. 452 Chapter Fourteen Responsibilities ........................................... 490 Chapter Fifteen Mission work ................................................. 524 Chapter Sixteen Taking stock .................................................. 558 EPILOGUE The Anneke Jans story ............................................................... 571 APPENDIX Relatives by blood and marriage of Evert Willemsz Bogaert: a reconstruction ........................................ 595 Index ........................................................................................... 605 FRIJHOFF_f1_i-xxviii.indd viii 8/15/2007 3:27:55 PM PREFACE An author is like an orphan. A person who sits down with pen and paper, a typewriter, or a text processor is left without a father or mother. The support of family and friends, education or social environment melts away. The fear of the blank page or the black screen recalls an orphan’s sense of helplessness in a world of friends with all-powerful fathers and mothers. Yet something emerges. The writer completes his book, the orphan nds a place in society. Is writing a metaphor of life? This book reverses the metaphor. The life of this seventeenth-century orphan resembles a writing process: with pen and ink supplied by oth- ers, in old words and images, a uniquely new and personal book came to be written. At one time I thought it should be possible to write a biography of an “ordinary” boy from the past. I wanted to get a grip on the “other” that gives body to history. I collected material about people who seemed unexceptional, made (and rejected) some rst attempts and tried to \ nd a way between lachrymose populism and the tiresome elitism that keeps cropping up in the writing of history. That was of course illusory. Evert Willemsz, the hero of this book, was born an “ordinary” boy, but he made his life into something that goes far beyond anything we perceive as ordinary. Even if he had not done so, every writer gives an extraordinary dimension to things that were at one time unremark- able. The “ordinary” is by de nition shallow, at, two-dimensional, and insigni cant. Meaning emerges from depth, from a play with similarities and differences that reveals the unique in the ordinary. It is the author who reconstructs the life strategy of his hero and gives it that label. Whether the subject of such a biography would recognize himself in it is another question. The only certainty here is that the biographer should respect the desire every person has to be taken seriously as an acting subject, as an individual with speci c thoughts and images, feel- ings and emotions, words and gestures. Although contained in categories determined by time, space, environment, and group, they nevertheless change with the tides and currents of personal experience. Here we also nd an answer to a second, almost inevitable question: How representative is the hero of this book? This, too, is a question FRIJHOFF_f1_i-xxviii.indd ix 8/15/2007 3:27:56 PM x preface based on an illusion. No one is representative. The historian who uses the word “representativeness” means representation, presentation, image. The writer re-presents his subject, in both senses of the word: he places him in the present, and he introduces him to readers in an image from which the author emerges as clearly as the subject himself. The writer raises to higher power, as it were, the life story that the hero of his book already wrote about himself. He rethinks choices made in the past and revamps old interpretations. The protagonist of the story would not necessarily recognize himself in this—but is anyone master of his own image? This book was born not only of an illusion but also of a small misunderstanding. Early in 1987, while searching for suitable material for group research in my postdoctoral seminar at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, I came across two pamphlets detailing the religious experience of the fteen-year-old orphan Evert Willemsz of Woerden. Here was the voice of a boy from the past! And this was an average youngster, not a highly gifted child like Grotius, Huygens, or Mozart. What at rst struck me as a curiosity soon crystallized into a challeng- ing question: Was this strange orphan boy a common dissembler—as his contemporary Wassenaer maintained, although without mention- ing his name? A closer analysis soon gave rise to doubts. This was no streamlined story about a model religious child, but an account of an orphan with a mind of his own and a pronounced personality. Not a sympathetic, God-fearing boy, but a recalcitrant and yet captivating individual. The members of the seminar shared my doubt and we laid out plans for joint research. The situation changed instantly thanks to a discussion with Nico Plomp, vice-director of the Central Bureau of Genealogy (The Hague) and expert on both Woerden and New Netherland. He told me that the boy who in the pamphlets is called only by his patronymic (Willemsz) had a surname (Bogaert) and a family, and that as Dominie Bogardus—the Latinized form of his name—he played a special role in the history of New Amsterdam, now New York. While little had been written about him in the Netherlands, a great deal had appeared in New York. But the American historiography lacked information about his youthful experiences because they were recorded in seventeenth-century