New Netherland Connections: Intimate Networks and Atlantic Ties in Seventeenth-Century America

1. “Goods, Wares, and Merchandise” Amsterdam’s Intimate Atlantic

CHAPTER ONE • • • “Goods, Wares, and Merchandise” Amsterdam’s Intimate Atlantic In 1619, an Amsterdam woman carefully packed a sea chest. Marritgen Wouters folded shirts and stockings, smoothed down pillows, and counted out coins into a sack. Her husband, Skipper Hendrick Christiaensz, stood ready to depart on the ship Swarte Beer, or Black Bear, for a journey to America. Though she did not know it at the time, she would never see her husband again; he would meet his end along the shores of the Hudson River, during fighting with the Native Americans he had hoped to profit from. By 1622, Marritgen would be struggling to regain her financial footing as a widow alone in Golden Age Amsterdam, one of the first, but far from one of the last, women widowed by Dutch North American ambitions. She did not describe her last glimpse of her husband. She might have waved goodbye from the docks, or, like many wives and children of men sailing to the East and West Indies, she could have headed up the steep steps of the Schreierstoren, or Weeper’s Tower, at the edge of the harbor for one last look as the ship weighed anchor. Perhaps she traveled as far as the “pure sand-duned beach” at Den Helder to “say adieu, until we meet again” from the “weeper hook” as the ship slipped out into the North Sea from the island of Texel. However Marritgen and Hendrick chose to say goodbye, they were not alone in their parting. With some fifty thousand maritime workers venturing forth annually from Dutch harbors in the late seventeenth century, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, parents and children took leave of one another time and time again (Figure 3).¹ 1. The Schreierstoren still stands, one of the few surviving buildings from early efforts to wall the growing city of Amsterdam in the fifteenth century. With its excellent view of the harbor and departing ships, the tower would be a perfect place to wave goodbye, and popular belief has long asserted that the name of the tower came from the weeping wives of VOC sailors, although this is doubtful. For a seventeenth-century poem depicting women and men Amsterdam’s Intimate Atlantic 27 FIGURE 3 •Leave-taking on the Dutch seashore. Engraving. From Elias Herckmans, Der zee-vaert lof, handelende vande gedenckwaerdighste zee-vaerden. . . . (Amsterdam, 1634), 211. This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif. This depiction of the painful farewells caused by overseas expansion accompanied a multi-book verse history of seafaring that celebrated the triumph of Dutch sailing in the Golden Age. who traveled to Den Helder to wave farewell as ships left Texel and headed into the North Sea, see E. Herckmans, Der zee-vaert lof, handelende vande gedenckwaerdighste zee-vaerden. . . . (Amsterdam, 1634), 211–213 (“pure,” 211, “say adieu,” 212, “weeper hook,” 213). For more on the mishaps of the Swarte Beer, see Victor Enthoven, “Early Dutch Expansion in the Atlantic Region, 1585–1621,” in Johannes Postma and Enthoven, eds., Riches from Atlantic Commerce: Dutch Transatlantic Trade and Shipping, 1585–1817 (Leiden, 2003), 38. For an exploration of one Dutch marriage across the seas, see Leonard Blussé, Bitters bruid: Een koloniaal huwelijksdrama in de Gouden Eeuw (Amsterdam, 1997). For transatlantic marriage in a later period, see Sarah M. S. Pearsall, Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 2008). For a dysfunctional Spanish transatlantic marriage, see Alexandra Parma Cook and Noble David Cook, Good Faith and Truthful Ignorance: A Case of Transatlantic Bigamy (Durham, N.C., 1991). On the numbers of sailors departing, see Annette de Wit, “Zeemansvrouwen aan het werk: De arbeidsmarktpositie van vrouwen in Maassluis, Schiedam, en Ter Heijde (1600–1700),” Tijdschrift voor sociale en economische geschiedenis, II, no. 3 (2005), 60; Karel Davids, “Maritime Labour in the Netherlands, 1570–1870,” Research in Maritime History, XIII (1997), 41–71. 28 Amsterdam’s Intimate Atlantic As the leader of a trading voyage to the coast of North America just ten years after Henry Hudson’s exploration of the area, Skipper Hendrick Christiaensz clearly took part in building a transatlantic economy while working for the short-lived New Netherland Company as it extended Dutch commerce across the ocean. Yet, those left behind in Amsterdam, like his wife, also participated in empire building, though in perhaps less obvious ways. Marritgen’s actions and choices, both when she readied her...