Source Criticism and the Study of Dutch-Indigenous Relations

The two books under review here share the theme of Dutch-Indigenous relations in colonial North America. The books also have in common the author William Starna, although the translated and edited account of Harmen Meyndertsz van den Bogaert’s journal is a collaborative effort between Starna and Charles Gehring, the director of the New Netherland Research Center in Albany, New York. While From Homeland to New Land also covers Mahican history after the English conquest of New Netherland in 1664, a substantial portion of Starna’s monograph discusses Mahican relations with Dutch settlers and officials in the upper Hudson Valley. As Starna himself identified in a historiographic article published ten years ago, the study of Dutch-Indigenous relations has always remained on the margins of Native American history and the history of New Netherland.¹ To remedy these problems, Starna called on scholars in his 2003 essay to more critically evaluate the primary sources as well as to more carefully reconstruct the histories and cultures of the Indigenous peoples who came in sustained contact with the Dutch. To what extent do these two recent publications, respectively edited and written by Starna, address Starna’s own concerns as brought forward in 2003? Not surprisingly, both books highlight the significance of critically analyzing primary sources. At the same time, Starna’s monograph on the Mahicans does not provide us with a new interpretive framework for the study of Dutch-Indigenous relations.

The first book, a translated and annotated account of the diplomatic mission of barber-surgeon Harmen Meyndertsz van den Bogaert to the Mohawks and the Oneidas in the winter of 1634–35, is a revised edition of the original publication from 1988. The report of Van den Bogaert is one of the earliest European accounts of the Iroquois Five Nations and, as such, it is of great historical and ethnological value. As Starna and Gehring note in the new preface, the introduction and the annotations in the revised edition reflect new scholarship on the Five Nations and on New Netherland that has appeared since the late 1980s. Another new feature in the revised edition is the inclusion of a complete transcription of the original Dutch account. The translation itself, though, did not change, nor did the English translation of the remarkable Mohawk-Dutch wordlist that was penned by Van den Bogaert and edited by the late Gunther Michelson, a Mohawk language specialist.

Moreover, Starna and Gehring’s claim in the introduction that they “decided to broaden the historical context surrounding Van den Bogaert’s journey” (p. xiii) remains debatable. Although the editors do include a bit more discussion on the Five Nations and on the personal lives of the three Dutch envoys, overall the historical context of the expedition and its aftermath remains thin. As the late and noted anthropologist Bruce Trigger already concluded in his review of the first edition in 1989, there is no mention in the introductory essay by Gehring and Starna about the tensions that existed between the Mohawks and the Dutch preceding Van den Bogaert’s journey.² In 1633, Mohawks slaughtered cattle and burned a sloop outside Fort Orange on the upper Hudson Valley out of anger at the presence in Fort Orange of Hans Hontom, a Dutch West India Company (WIC) official who had recently killed a Mohawk headman. Most likely the mission of Van den Bogaert was made in order to restore amicable relations with the Mohawks, who were vital trading partners of the WIC. The Mohawk-Dutch tensions of 1633 remain surprisingly unaddressed in the revised edition. Gehring and Starna...