University of Virginia Library

4. CHAP. IV.

If we could but get a peep at the tally of dame
Fortune, where, like a notable landlady, she regularly
chalks up the debtor and creditor accounts of
mankind, we should find that, upon the whole, good
and evil are pretty nearly balanced in this world;
and that though we may for a long while revel in
the very lap of prosperity, the time will at length
come, when we must ruefully pay off the reckoning.
Fortune, in fact, is a pestilent shrew, and
withal a most inexorable creditor; for though she
may indulge her favourites in long credits, and
overwhelm them with her favours; yet sooner or
later, she brings up her arrears, with the rigour of
an experienced publican, and washes out her scores
with their tears. “Since,” says good old Bœtius
in his consolations of philosophy, “since no man
can retain her at his pleasure, and since her flight
is so deeply lamented, what are her favours but

sure prognostications of approaching trouble and
calamity.”

There is nothing that more moves my contempt
at the stupidity and want of reflection in my
fellow men, than to behold them rejoicing, and indulging
in security and self confidence, in times of
prosperity. To a wise man, who is blessed with
the light of reason, those are the very moments of
anxiety and apprehension; well knowing that according
to the system of things, happiness is at
best but transient—and that the higher a man is elevated
by the capricious breath of fortune, the lower
must be his proportionate depression. Whereas,
he who is overwhelmed by calamity, has the less
chance of encountering fresh disasters, as a man at
the bottom of a hill, runs very little risk of breaking
his neck by tumbling to the top.

This is the very essence of true wisdom, which
consists in knowing when we ought to be miserable;
and was discovered much about the same
time with that invaluable secret, that “every thing
is vanity and vexation of spirit;” in consequence
of which maxim your wise men have ever been the
unhappiest of the human race; esteeming it as an
infalliable mark of genius to be distressed without
reason—since any man may be miserable in time of
misfortune, but it is the philosopher alone who
can discover cause for grief in the very hour of
prosperity.

According to the principle I have just advanced,
we find that the colony of New Netherlands,
which under the reign of the renowned Van Twiller,
had flourished in such alarming and fatal serenity;
is now paying for its former welfare, and
discharging the enormous debt of comfort which it
contracted. Foes harass it from different quarters;
the city of New Amsterdam, while yet in its
infancy is kept in constant alarm; and its valiant
commander little William the Testy answers the
vulgar, but expressive idea of “a man in a peck of
troubles.”

While busily engaged repelling his bitter enemies
the Yankees, on one side, we find him suddenly
molested in another quarter, and by other
assailants. A vagrant colony of Swedes, under
the conduct of Peter Minnewits, and professing allegience
to that redoubtable virago, Christina queen
of Sweden; had settled themselves and erected
a fort on south (or Delaware) river—within the
boundaries, claimed by the Government of the
New Netherlands. History is mute as to the particulars
of their first landing, and their real pretensions
to the soil, and this is the more to be lamented;
as this same colony of Swedes will hereafter
be found most materially to affect, not only the interests
of the Nederlanders, but of the world at
large!

In whatever manner therefore, this vagabond
colony of Swedes first took possession of the country,
it is certain that in 1638, they established a
fort, and Minnewits, according to the off hand usage
of his contemporaries, declared himself governor of
all the adjacent country, under the name of the province
of New Sweden. No sooner did this reach
the ears of the choleric Wilhelmus, than, like a true
spirited chieftan, he immediately broke into a violent
rage, and calling together his council, belaboured
the Swedes most lustily in the longest speech
that had ever been heard in the colony, since the
memorable dispute of Ten breeches and Tough
breeches. Having thus given vent to the first ebullitions
of his indignation, he had resort to his favourite
measure of proclamation, and dispatched
one, piping hot, in the first year of his reign, informing
Peter Minnewits that the whole territory,
bordering on the south river, had, time out of mind,
been in possession of the Dutch colonists, having
been “beset with forts, and sealed with their
blood.”

The latter sanguinary sentence, would convey
an idea of direful war and bloodshed; were we not
relieved by the information that it merely related to
a fray, in which some half a dozen Dutchmen had
been killed by the Indians, in their benevolent attempts
to establish a colony and promote civilization.
By this it will be seen that William Kieft,

though a very small man, delighted in big expressions,
and was much given to a praise-worthy figure
in rhetoric, generally cultivated by your little great
men, called hyperbole. A figure which has been
found of infinite service among many of his class,
and which has helped to swell the grandeur of many
a mighty self-important, but windy chief magistrate.
Nor can I resist in this place, from observing
how much my beloved country is indebted to
this same figure of hyperbole, for supporting certain
of her greatest characters—statesmen, orators,
civilians and divines; who by dint of big words,
inflated periods, and windy doctrines, are kept
afloat on the surface of society, as ignorant swimmers
are buoyed up by blown bladders.

The proclamation against Minnewits concluded
by ordering the self-dubbed governor, and his gang
of Swedish adventurers, immediately to leave the
country under penalty of the high displeasure, and
inevitable vengeance of the puissant government of
the Nieuw Nederlandts. This “strong measure,”
however, does not seem to have had a whit more
effect than its predecessors, which had been thundered
against the Yankees—the Swedes resolutely
held on to the territory they had taken possession
of—whereupon matters for the present remained in
statu quo.

That Wilhelmus Kieft should put up with this
insolent obstinacy in the Swedes, would appear incompatible

with his valourous temperament; but
we find that about this time the little man had his
hands full; and what with one annoyance and another,
was kept continually on the bounce.

There is a certain description of active legislators,
who by shrewd management, contrive always
to have a hundred irons on the anvil, every one of
which must be immediately attended to; who consequently
are ever full of temporary shifts and expedients,
patching up the public welfare and cobbling
the national affairs, so as to make nine holes where
they mend one—stopping chinks and flaws with
whatever comes first to hand, like the Yankees I
have mentioned stuffing old clothes in broken windows.
Of this class of statesmen was William
the Testy—and had he only been blessed with powers
equal to his zeal, or his zeal been disciplined by a
little discretion, there is very little doubt but he
would have made the greatest governor of his size
on record—the renowned governor of the island of
Barataria alone excepted.

The great defect of Wilhelmus Kieft's policy
was, that though no man could be more ready to stand
forth in an hour of emergency, yet he was so intent
upon guarding the national pocket, that he suffered
the enemy to break its head—in other words, whatever
precaution for public safety he adopted, he was
so intent upon rendering it cheap, that he invariably
rendered it ineffectual. All this was a remote consequence

of his profound education at the Hague—
where having acquired a smattering of knowledge,
he was ever after a great conner of indexes, continually
dipping into books, without ever studying to
the bottom of any subject; so that he had the scum
of all kinds of authors fermenting in his pericranium.
In some of these title page researches he unluckily
stumbled over a grand political cabalistic
word, which, with his customary facility he immediately
incorporated into his great scheme of government,
to the irretrievable injury and delusion
of the honest province of Nieuw Nederlandts, and
the eternal misleading, of all experimental rulers.

In vain have I pored over the Theurgia of the
Chaldeans, the Cabala of the Jews, the Necromancy
of the Arabians—The Magic of the Persians—the
Hocus Pocus of the English, the Witch-craft of
the Yankees, or the Pow-wowing of the Indians to
discover where the little man first laid eyes on this
terrible word. Neither the Sephir Jetzirah, that
famous cabalistic volume, ascribed to the Patriarch
Abraham; nor the pages of the Zohar, containing
the mysteries of the cabala, recorded by the learned
rabbi Simeon Jochaides, yield any light to my enquiries—Nor
am I in the least benefited by my
painful researches in the Shem-hamphorah of Benjamin,
the wandering Jew, though it enabled Davidus
Elm to make a ten days' journey, in twenty
four hours. Neither can I perceive the slightest

affinity in the Tetragrammaton, or sacred name of
four letters, the profoundest word of the Hebrew
Cabala; a mystery, sublime, ineffable and incommunicable—and
the letters of which Jod-He-Van-He,
having been stolen by the Pagans, constituted
their great Name Jao, or Jove. In short, in all my
cabalistic, theurgic, necromantic, magical and astrological
researches, from the Tetractys of Pythagoras,
to the recondite works of Breslaw and mother
Bunch, I have not discovered the least vestige of
an origin of this word, nor have I discovered any
word of sufficient potency to counteract it.

Not to keep my reader in any suspence, the
word which had so wonderfully arrested the attention
of William the Testy and which in German
characters, had a particularly black and ominous
aspect, on being fairly translated into the English
is no other than economy—a talismanic term,
which by constant use and frequent mention, has
ceased to be formidable in our eyes, but which has
as terrible potency as any in the arcana of necromancy.

When pronounced in a national assembly it has
an immediate effect in closing the hearts, beclouding
the intellects, drawing the purse strings and buttoning
the breeches pockets of all philosophic legislators.
Nor are its effects on the eye less wonderful.
It produces a contraction of the retina, an
obscurity of the christaline lens, a viscidity of the

vitreous and an inspiration of the aqueous humours,
an induration of the tunica sclerotica and a
convexity of the cornea; insomuch that the organ of
vision loses its strength and perspicuity, and the
unfortunate patient becomes myopes or in plain
English, pur-blind; perceiving only the amount of
immediate expense without being able to look further,
and regard it in connexion with the ultimate
object to be effected.—“So that,” to quote the
words of the eloquent Burke, “a briar at his nose
is of greater magnitude than an oak at five hundred
yards distance.” Such are its instantaneous operations,
and the results are still more astonishing.
By its magic influence seventy-fours, shrink into
frigates—frigates into sloops, and sloops into gunboats.
As the defenceless fleet of Eneas, at the
command of the protecting Venus, changed into sea
nymphs, and protected itself by diving; so the
mighty navy of America, by the cabalistic word
economy, dwindles into small craft, and shelters
itself in a mill-pond!

This all potent word, which served as his
touchstone in politics, at once explains the whole
system of proclamations, protests, empty threats,
windmills trumpeters, and paper war, carried on by
Wilhelmus the Testy—and we may trace its operations
in an armament which he fitted out in 1642 in a moment of great wrath; consisting of two
sloops and thirty men, under the command of

Mynheer Jan Jansen Alpendam, as admiral of the
fleet, and commander in chief of the forces. This
formidable expedition, which can only be paralleled
by some of the daring cruizes of our infant navy,
about the bay and up the sound; was intended to
drive the Marylanders from the Schuylkill, of
which they had recently taken possession—and
which was claimed as part of the province of New
Nederlants—for it appears that at this time our infant
colony was in that enviable state, so much
coveted by ambitious nations, that is to say, the
government had a vast extent of territory; part of
which it enjoyed, and the greater part of which it
had continually to quarrel about.

Admiral Jan Jansen Alpendam was a man of
great mettle and prowess; and no way dismayed at
the character of the enemy; who were represented
as a gigantic gunpowder race of men, who lived on
hoe cakes and bacon, drank mint juleps and brandy
toddy, and were exceedingly expert at boxing,
biting, gouging, tar and feathering, and a variety of
other athletic accomplishments, which they had
borrowed from their cousins german and prototypes
the Virginians, to whom they have ever borne
considerable resemblance—notwithstanding all these
alarming representations, the admiral entered the
Schuylkill most undauntedly with his fleet, and
arrived without disaster or opposition at the place
of destination.

Here he attacked the enemy in a vigorous
speech in low dutch, which the wary Kieft had previously
put in his pocket; wherein he courteously
commenced by calling them a pack of lazy, louting,
dram drinking, cock fighting, horse racing, slave
driving, tavern haunting, sabbath breaking, mulatto
breeding upstarts—and concluded by ordering them
to evacuate the country immediately—to which
they most laconically replied in plain English (as
was very natural for Swedes) “they'd see him
d—d first.”

Now this was a reply for which neither Jan
Jansen Alpendam, nor Wilhelmus Kieft had made
any calculation—and finding himself totally unprepared
to answer so terrible a rebuff with suitable
hostility he concluded, like a most worthy admiral
of a modern English expedition, that his wisest
course was to return home and report progress.
He accordingly sailed back to New Amsterdam,
where he was received with great honours, and
considered as a pattern for all commanders; having
achieved a most hazardous enterprize, at a
trifling expense of treasure, and without losing a
single man to the state!—He was unanimously
called the deliverer of his country; (an appellation
liberally bestowed on all great men) his two sloops
having done their duty, were laid up (or dry docked)
in a cove now called the Albany Bason, where

they quietly rotted in the mud; and to immortalize
his name, they erected, by subscription, a magnificent
shingle monument on the top of Flatten barrack[6]
Hill, which lasted three whole years; when it fell
to pieces, and was burnt for fire-wood.