History: 'By God I think the devil shits Dutchmen" wrote Samuel Pepys in his diary. Pepys's antipathy towards the Dutch was typical of many living in late 17th-century England and might be attributed to envy of Dutch commercial prosperity and their military successes, especially against Hapsburg Spain, the super power of early modern Europe writes Jane Ohlmeyer.
Others would have regarded with suspicion the distinctive political organisation of the United Provinces as a federal republic, founded on the ideal of free speech in politics and freedom of worship. This faith in free thought in a century of political and religious bigotry was very unusual indeed. Moreover, during this "golden age" Dutchmen were ubiquitous throughout the Old World and the New and their burgeoning seaborne empire included territories in North America where they competed with their European neighbours - especially the English - for access to natural resources and land. These histories, by David Price and Russell Shorto, examine English and Dutch expansionism in the early 17th-century Atlantic world.
Price's account of the English colonisation of Virginia and especially of the Jamestown settlement during the early decades of the 17th century is well known and features a familiar cast of impetuous explorers, avaricious adventurers and native Indian warlords, including the dashing English colonist John Smith, the young Indian princess, Pocahontas, and her all-powerful father, Chief Powhatan. In a book that is derived largely from secondary works, Price recounts the trials and tribulations of the early colonists and their interactions with the native inhabitants of the Chesapeake. Pocahontas's conversion to Christianity, her marriage to John Rolfe and her visit in 1616 to England (where she later died) is retold with great clarity, as are the events surrounding the Indian attack of March 22nd, 1622 on the struggling colony. This "massacre" claimed the lives of between a third and a quarter of the newcomers and precipitated a series of brutal and bloody reprisals by the English on the natives.
Of course, these stories of interaction between "native" and "newcomer", of colonisation and empire, and of "massacre" and "atrocity" are familiar to scholars of early modern Ireland, but Price makes no attempt to set his findings in the wider context of early modern imperial or comparative history. Moreover, Price hardly acknowledges the North American ambitions and influences of European powers other than England. For this, we need to look to Shorto's book which offers a history of the Dutch colony in "Manhattan", a vast territory that includes present-day New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and Delaware, between its discovery in 1609 (by an English explorer, Henry Hudson) and its surrender to the English in 1664.
As Shorto points out, history tends to be written by the winners but this book is written from the perspective of the losers, in other words, the Dutch. As a result, The Island at the Centre of the World represents a refreshing, non-Anglocentric perspective on the early history of America. While Shorto recognises the significance of English influences on the development of early America, he carefully contextualises these alongside the contributions that other European powers - the French, the Swedes and, above all, the Dutch - made to the emergence of a distinctive American political, social and cultural identity. Thus, the decision in 1787 to enshrine in the new constitution of the American republic the advantages of the Dutch federal scheme should come as no surprise.
Shorto also examines the factors that pushed colonists from the Old World and those that attracted them to the New and highlights the importance of Manhattan as a port in the Atlantic trading empire. Particularly engaging are his pen portraits of key colonists in the Dutch settlement such as Peter Minuit, who in 1626 purchased Manhattan from the local inhabitants for 60 guilders (or $24) worth of goods. For Shorto, Adriaen van der Donck, a daring young lawyer and "champion" of the colonists, is the hero of the book whilst the villain is Peter Stuyvesant, the repressed and repressive peg-legged governor who finally surrendered the colony to the English in 1664. Shorto enthusiastically dubs Van der Donck "the unheralded father of New York City" and argues (but not particularly convincingly) that he laid the foundations for the development of city government and in so doing moulded "the American continent and character". Where the records permit, Shorto focuses on "ordinary settlers" such as Catalina Trico and her husband, Joris Rapalje, whose descendants allegedly now number over one million people.
Shorto has a gripping tale of conquest, conflict and colonisation to tell and by and large he tells it well. Whilst the prose is purple in places, Shorto's analysis is firmly grounded in archival and other primary records, including those of the often overlooked New Netherland archive (housed in New York State library in Albany), the extant records of the West India Company and caches of poetry by West India Company officials housed in the Maritime Museum in Amsterdam. Shorto's book makes an original contribution to our knowledge both of early American history and of the early modern struggle for global empire. Having read it, it is easy to appreciate why Pepys alleged that the "devil shits Dutchmen" or why, in the words of Sir william Temple, a more sympathetic (and Irish) commentator, "The United Provinces are the envy of some, the fear of others and the wonder of all their neighbours".