Part I · TWO HOMELANDS, TWO FLAGS · Chapter 5

Two Strangers Walk Across Staten Island

Gowanus to the Kill Van Kull · 11–13 October 1679

In the record Jasper Dankers · Peter Sluyter · Derrick² Kroesen (1662–1731) · Pieter Jans Staats (b. 1638) · Pierre Gardinier · Cornelius Corsen · Cornelius Nevius

On the evening of Tuesday, 10 October 1679, two men who had been trying for two days to find a boat to Staten Island were taken in hand by a farmer they call "our old friend Symon, who had come over from Gouanes." He offered to row them across himself. "We accepted, and at dusk accompanied him in his boat to Gouanus, where we arrived about 8 o'clock, and where he welcomed us and entertained us well" [1]. They slept at his house on the Gowanus shore. At first light on Wednesday he put them in his skiff and rowed them the eight miles across the bay, and left them on the island "about 8 o'clock" [1].

The two men were Jasper Dankers and Peter Sluyter, and they were not tourists. They were agents of a Dutch religious community, the Labadists, sent from Friesland to find land in America for a colony, and they were keeping a journal of everything they saw for the brethren at home — the soil, the people, the price of a meal — in a plain, exact, slightly disapproving hand [2]. Their manuscript sat unread in a bookshop in Amsterdam for nearly two centuries until a Brooklyn historian bought it in 1864 and translated it. It is the only account by anyone who walked across Staten Island in the year the Croesen and Staats families had just taken their patents on its north shore [2]. Simon's farm, where they spent the night, was on the same shore as Garret's twenty-eight acres. Garret was six weeks past the beating in the grape arbour, "very bad," with five months to live. The journal does not mention him. It could not have; the two strangers did not know he existed. But they were rowed out from his shore, at dawn, by his neighbour, and what they wrote down that week is the world his son was about to move into.

The island before them

They were walking onto ground that had been fought over, sold, and emptied more times than any place its size in the colony. The family's genealogist, who had to explain Staten Island before he could explain why anyone would want a patent on it, told the story straight through, and it runs like this [3].

Hudson's crew saw it in 1609, and one of them, John Coleman, took a Raritan arrow through the throat in the Kill Van Kull and became, on the genealogist's reckoning, perhaps the first European killed by an Indian on that coast [3]. In August 1630 the West India Company's director on Manhattan took a deed for the whole island from eight Raritan men — "Krahorat, Tamekap, Tetemakwemama, Wieromies, Siearewach, Sackwewew, Wissipoock, Saheinsios or the young one, inhabitants, owners and inheritors of the island called by us Staten-Island" — on behalf of a Company director in Amsterdam who never came, "for a certain lot of merchandise" [4]. He sold the patent back four years later for 26,000 guilders. The Company sold it on to a sea-captain, David de Vries, who in September 1638 piloted his own ship in past Sandy Hook, "anchored the same evening before Staten Island, which was my property, and put my people on shore" [5].

De Vries built a village, the Oude Dorp, near where the two strangers would land forty years later, and it was destroyed three times. The first time, in 1641, began with pigs: Company servants bound for the Delaware stopped at the island for water, stole hogs from De Vries's farm, and blamed the Raritans; Governor Kieft, who the genealogist notes "was drunk when he heard the report," sent soldiers, and then offered a bounty — "10 fathoms of wampum for the head of a Raritan, 20 fathoms of wampum for the head of every Indian engaged in the murders upon Staten Island" [6]. The Raritans killed four of De Vries's men and burned his houses, and De Vries, who had dealt with them honestly and knew exactly whose fault it was, wrote it down: "the blame was laid on the innocent Indians, who though cunning enough, will do no harm if no harm is done to them. And so my colony of Staten Island was smothered in its birth by the management of Governor Kieft" [6]. The second time was in the winter war of 1643. The third was in 1655, and it began with peaches — a former Fiscal on Manhattan shot an Indian woman he thought was stealing from his orchard, and in three days of reprisals across the harbour twenty-three of the island's ninety inhabitants were killed and the Oude Dorp burned for good [7].

The men who owned the island in those years spent them suing each other. Kieft and the patroon Cornelis Melyn were "living in a state of unremitting hostility"; Stuyvesant, arriving in 1647, sided with Kieft and banished Melyn; and in September of that year the ship carrying them all home to argue it out in Amsterdam — Kieft, Melyn, Melyn's partner, and the Reverend Everardus Bogardus, whose son would one day marry Elizabeth Cregier's widowed mother — struck the rocks off Swansea in the Bristol Channel. Kieft, "seeing death before his eyes," is reported to have turned to the men he had banished and said, "Friends, I have been unjust towards you; can you forgive me?" and then drowned, with Bogardus and Melyn's son and eighty-three others. Melyn was rescued, won his appeal, and came back to the island to keep fighting [8].

By 1661 the Dutch had bought the island back from Melyn and were settling Walloons on it. By 1670 the English governor Lovelace had bought it again from the Raritans, insisting this time "that the deed be signed by every Indian on the Island, including children," and the price is in the record: four hundred fathoms of wampum, thirty match-coats, eight coats of duffel, thirty shirts, thirty kettles, twenty guns, a firkin of powder, sixty bars of lead, thirty axes, thirty hoes, fifty knives [9]. "This may have been the fifth time in thirty-four years that the Indians sold Staten Island or parts of it," the genealogist wrote, and then, of what came after: "By the end of the century, only one Indian family remained, named Sam and Hannah, and their daughter Nance." They sold baskets for rum. Hannah disappeared; the daughter left the island and was never heard from again. "What a sad finish to a once proud people" [9]. In 1673 the Dutch fleet raided Lovelace's own plantation for cattle on its way to retake the province — the plantation whose "land laid out for Colonel Lovelace" bounded Garret's patent four years later — and in 1675 the English were back, with a new governor, Andros, and a friend of his, Christopher Billop, who got 1,300 acres [10]. By 1679, the genealogist reckons, there were about a hundred families on the island. Practically no roads. "People lived near the shoreline and traveled almost entirely by boat" [10].

That is what Simon rowed the two strangers into.

The walk

They began with the island itself, as a surveyor would:

Neither church nor minister. Cattle turned loose in the woods with their owners' marks on them. The best land, in the middle, empty, because nobody would live out of reach of a boat. A hundred families, mostly Dutch and French, and a handful of English who "are less disposed to religion, and inquire little of it." The Dutch and the French "spoke of" wanting a minister "wherever we went." That is the whole condition of the island in a paragraph, and it is the condition Derrick and Hendrick would spend the next twenty years inside.

Then the two men set off south along the eastern shore to find the Oude Dorp, and got lost. They climbed a bluff "through the bushes and thickets, which we accomplished with great difficulty and in a perspiration," found "nothing but woods, through which no one could see," followed "slight tracks into the woods … till at last they ran to nothing else than dry leaves," and after "an hour or more in the woods, now in a hollow and then over a hill, at one time through a swamp, at another across a brook," fought their way back to the shore a quarter of an hour from where they had started [1]. There was a house. In it "was no master, but an English woman with negroes and servants":

They went on round the rocky point, saw "a pretty little sand bay, and a small creek, and not far from there, cattle and houses," and discovered that the path they had abandoned on the hill would have brought them there in three hundred steps. At about two o'clock they reached the Oude Dorp, De Vries's village, three times burned and rebuilt: "There were seven houses, but only three in which anybody lived. The others were abandoned, and their owners gone to live on better places on the Island, because the ground around this village was worn out and barren, and also too limited for their use" [1]. The English family in the first house fed them and charged them for it — "three guilders in seewan, although we only drank water" — which they note with some feeling, having been charged for nothing anywhere else on their travels. They got lost again in the dark between the old village and the new one, broke out of the woods toward a light, and were taken in at the first house of the Nieuwe Dorp by "an Englishman who could speak Dutch," whose wife "was a Dutch woman from the Manhattans, who was glad to have us in her house" [1].

The second day was the south shore, "from one plantation to another, for the most part belonging to the French, who showed us every kindness because we conversed with them in French." Creeks full of wild turkeys and geese and snipe. And a sight they could not explain: "Lying rotting on the shore were thousands of fish called marsbancken, which are about the size of a common carp," driven onto the beach by bigger fish and stranded by the tide, "food for the eagles and other birds of prey" [1]. At the west point an Englishman living alone warned them they had "a very bad road for two or three hours ahead," and they did — a creek that ran far inland, a valley they mistook for its end, a road that led away from the shore, and finally, cutting through the bushes on a compass line of their own, this:

They got directions from him and went on. That evening a Frenchman called La Chaudronnier — "formerly a soldier under the Prince of Orange, and had served in Brazil," like Adam Brouwer — "was so delighted, and held on to us so hard, that we remained and spent the night with him." And on the third morning, Friday the 13th, they came to the plantation of Pierre Gardinier:

A seventy-year-old man with sick children at home paddled two strangers across the Kill Van Kull himself because there was no one else to send and he could not bear to let them go. They walked half an hour inland to Elizabethtown, found a boat loading brick for the city, slept, and sailed at three in the morning. Three days, the length of the island, from Simon's skiff to Gardinier's canoe. The Kill Van Kull they crossed at the end is the water Garret's patent fronted on; whether Gardinier's plantation lay near the Croesen and Staats lots cannot be said from the journal, but the family's land was on that same north-western shore, in the part the travellers called "well provided with creeks and marshes," where "the land is generally better than on the south side," and it is at least possible that the last house they passed was a neighbour's.

Derrick's island

When Derrick Kroesen made the island his home — the family's genealogist puts it between 1686 and 1688, three or four years after he married Elizabeth, though the marriage record already had him "dwelling on Staten Island" in 1684 — it was still the place the two strangers had walked: a hundred-odd families along the shore, no church, no roads, cattle in the woods [11]. He and Elizabeth kept baptizing their children at Breuckelen, across the water, until 1693, because there was nowhere on the island to do it and the Breuckelen church was where his father had been suspended from the Table and his mother had been received [11]. His first recorded act on the island is in 1688, among the "Burger Recruits" — the militia [11]. His second is a rebellion.

The genealogist introduces it with a wink at the medium this family has since thought about: "As rebellions go, it wasn't a big one. It did have some of those attributes that Hollywood is always looking for: power, religion, politics, maybe murder, mayhem, rumors, and intrigue" [12]. In 1688 the Catholic James II lost his throne to William of Orange, and in New York, a Protestant colony that had been governed for the Catholic king by a Catholic governor, the news arrived as rumour and panic: that James was coming back with a French army, that "Papists" were being recruited into the fort, that the old governor's brigantine "had been armed for some desperate enterprise." On Staten Island "people left their homes during the night and hid in crude shelters in the forest. Others sailed off in small boats, seeking shelter in inlets around the Island" — the Huguenot families who had fled Catholic France once already were not going to wait to be caught by it twice [12]. On Manhattan a mob surrounded the house of a German-born merchant and militia captain named Jacob Leisler and demanded he seize the fort in the name of William and Mary. He did. For two years he governed the colony. In December 1689 he cancelled every commission the old governors had issued and named officers of his own for Staten Island, and two of the names on that list matter to this book: Cornelius Corsen, captain and justice, and Cornelius Nevius, ensign [13]. Hendrick Kroesen would marry Corsen's daughter. Derrick's eldest son would marry Nevius's.

Derrick's own part was smaller and stranger. In 1688 Leisler had refused to pay port duties on a cargo of wine to the collector, Matthew Plowman, because Plowman was a Catholic; once in power he declared Plowman a "defaulter," and sent a sergeant, Johannes Burger, to Staten Island to recruit men to seize Plowman's property — beef and pork stored at Elizabethtown, across the Kill. The sergeant's recruits are named in the record: "John Jeronison, Thomas Morgan, Lawrence Johnson, John Pietersen, Dereck Crews (Cruser), Chauck (Jaques) Pollion and John Bedine" [14]. Dereck Crews was Derrick Kroesen. John Pietersen was his cousin John Pietersen Staats. They rowed across the Kill Van Kull — Gardinier's crossing, the other way — and took a Catholic customs officer's salt meat in the name of a Protestant king, and the meat went to Albany.

Then, in March 1691, a new governor arrived from England, Leisler at first refused to hand over the fort, and on 16 May 1691 he was hanged and beheaded for treason [13]. Plowman, restored, sued everyone who had taken his meat. The recruits petitioned the governor, admitting the taking and pleading that "they believed they were doing a service to their Majesties; that they considered it unjust to compel them to pay for the provisions when the whole country had the benefit of them" — and asking, if they must pay, that "every person engaged in the removal be compelled to pay their equal proportions of the same" [14]. Plowman himself, oddly, submitted the petition on their behalf. The outcome is not recorded. "Derrick and John survived," the genealogist writes, "and they did not meet Leisler's fate, much to our family's satisfaction." In the Bucks County section, summing up Derrick's life, he adds his own reading: Derrick "may have been lucky to get off as lightly as he did. I suspect that it had more to do with religion, than politics" [15]. A Dutch Reformed farmer's son, with a Burgomaster's granddaughter for a wife, raiding a Catholic's storehouse in a Protestant panic. The genealogist is probably right, and it is worth saying what it means: the first political act of the family's second American generation was a religious one, and it was against Catholics, and it was on the winning side.

His cousin John Pietersen Staats was in more trouble than that — named by the new sheriff in 1691 among three men accused of "Riots and Tumults and the subscribing of papers," the papers being two petitions, one asking leniency for Leisler and the other demanding that the county's assessors, "who had exempted themselves from paying taxes on slaves," pay like everyone else. Fined three pounds, and then the fines refunded, "but not without more rhetoric" [16]. That is also where the family's island shows itself: at the turn of the century it had nearly seven hundred people, and slaves were about one in ten of them [16]. The Kroesens of the next generation would own some. That is a later chapter, and it is in Pennsylvania, and it has a name in it.

The ground it happened on

As in every chapter: none of this is a document about the family. It is what the period's own describers said about the things named above. The Labadists were a Pietist sect gathered around the French ex-Jesuit Jean de Labadie, settled by 1679 at Wieuwerd in Friesland, and Dankers and Sluyter had been sent to scout land for a daughter colony — which they eventually founded at Bohemia Manor in Maryland, not on Staten Island; the island failed their inspection [2]. Their journal's Dutch is exact about money because they were accounting to the brethren: seewan is wampum, and three guilders of it for a meal of water was highway robbery. The marsbancken rotting on the south shore are menhaden — "mossbunker" in the Dutch-derived English of New York — oily fish that school in millions and are driven ashore by bluefish, exactly as the travellers guessed [17]. Achter Kol, "behind the Kill," was the Dutch name for the New Jersey shore across the Kill Van Kull, where Elizabethtown stood; the brick boat they took to the city was the ordinary way anyone on the western island reached Manhattan, which is why the family's patents fronted the water and ran back into unvisited woods. The English woman "with negroes and servants" and the sick Englishman in the brush shelter are the island's two ends in the same day: an established farm worked by enslaved people, and a family in a hut of branches two months into an illness with nobody near. The Dutch and French families the travellers ate with were in between, and so, within a decade, was Derrick.

1. The journal of 9–13 October 1679: Jasper Dankers and Peter Sluyter, Journal of a Voyage to New York and a Tour in Several of the American Colonies in 1679–80, translated and edited by Henry C. Murphy (Memoirs of the Long Island Historical Society, Vol. I, 1867), public domain; the Staten Island passages are reprinted, via Bayles's History of Richmond County, in Warren D. Cruise, The Croesen Families of America, Vol. I (Gateway Press, Baltimore, 1998), pp. 101–107, and are quoted here from that reprint. Cruise dates the visit "June 1676" (p. 101); the journal's own dates, and Murphy's edition, place it in October 1679, and this chapter follows the journal. "Our old friend Symon" is Simon Aertsen de Hart of Gowanus, whose farm the travellers had visited on 29 September, and whose oysters and peaches are described in the same journal under 29 September 1679 — the passage drawn on in chapter 2.
2. Dankers, Sluyter and the Labadists; Murphy's purchase of the manuscript in Amsterdam in 1864; the Bohemia Manor colony: Murphy's introduction to the 1867 edition, and Bartlett B. James and J. Franklin Jameson (eds.), Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679–1680 (Scribner's, 1913), public domain.
3. Hudson, John Coleman and the Raritan signal-fires: Cruise, pp. 81–82, citing Transcriptions of Early Town Records of New York: Earliest Volume of Staten Island Records, 1678–1813, p. xii.
4. The Indian deed of 10 August 1630 to Michiel Pauw (GG 6), with the eight names: Gehring (ed.), New York Historical Manuscripts: Dutch, Land Papers, p. 3, in Cruise, p. 83.
5. Pauw's resale for 26,000 guilders; De Vries's patent, his arrival on 26 September 1638 and his own words: Cruise, pp. 84–85, quoting Bayles, History of Richmond County, ch. III, p. 64.
6. The pigs, Kieft's bounty, the reprisal of 1641 and De Vries's account of it: Cruise, pp. 85–86, citing Bayles, ch. III, pp. 54, 65, and the Staten Island Records, p. xii.
7. The destructions of 1643 and 1655, the peach orchard, the ninety inhabitants: Cruise, pp. 87–88, 91.
8. Melyn, Kieft, Stuyvesant, and the wreck of the Princess off Swansea, 27–28 September 1647, with Kieft's reported words: Cruise, pp. 88–90, citing Bayles, ch. III, pp. 66–67, and William B. Bogardus, Dear "Cousin", p. 29. The Reverend Everardus Bogardus who drowned was the father of Willem Bogardus, who married Walburg De Sille in 1669 (chapter 1).
9. The Walloons of 1661; Lovelace's 1670 repurchase, the deed "signed by every Indian on the Island, including children," the price, "the fifth time in thirty-four years," and Sam, Hannah and Nance: Cruise, pp. 91–93, citing Bayles, ch. III, pp. 59, 78–79, and the Staten Island Records, pp. xvi–xviii.
10. The Dutch raid on Lovelace's cattle in 1673, Andros and Billop in 1675, "about one hundred families" by 1679, no roads and travel by boat: Cruise, pp. 94–95.
11. Derrick's move to the island c. 1687–88, the 1684 marriage record's "dwelling on Staten Island," the Breuckelen baptisms to 1693, and the "Burger Recruits" of 1688: Cruise, pp. 68, 171, 319.
12. Leisler's Rebellion on Staten Island — the panic, the shelters in the forest, the boats in the inlets, the Huguenots, and the genealogist's Hollywood remark: Cruise, pp. 95–97, citing Bayles, ch. III, pp. 96–97.
13. Leisler's commission of 17 December 1689 and the Staten Island officers, including Cornelius Corsen and Cornelius Nevius; Slaughter's arrival, 19 March 1691, and Leisler's execution, 16 May 1691: Cruise, p. 97, citing Bayles, ch. III, pp. 97–98. Hendrick² Kroesen married Cornelia Corsen (Cruise, p. 1 and the Hendrick section); Garret³ Kroesen married Arientje Nevius, daughter of Cornelius Nevius (Cruise, p. 228).
14. The Plowman affair — the wine, Sergeant Burger, the seven recruits including "Dereck Crews (Cruser)" and John Pietersen, the seizure at Elizabethtown, and the recruits' petition: Cruise, pp. 100–101, quoting Bayles, ch. III, p. 100. "From this record it is evident that Derrick was living on Staten Island in 1690" is Cruise's conclusion, p. 101.
15. "Lucky to get off as lightly as he did … more to do with religion, than politics": Cruise, p. 319.
16. John Pietersen Staats, "Riots and Tumults and the subscribing of papers," the two petitions, the three-pound fines; the island's population of nearly 700 with slaves about ten per cent at the turn of the century: Cruise, pp. 98–99, 101, citing Bayles, ch. III, p. 99.
17. Menhaden ("mossbunker," from the Dutch marsbanker) and their stranding: Murphy's note to the 1867 edition; the etymology is the standard one in American dictionaries.