University of Virginia Library

7. CHAP VII.

When treating of these tempestuous times, the
unknown writer of the Stuyvesant manuscript,
breaks out into a vehement apostrophe, in praise of
the good St. Nicholas; to whose protecting care he
entirely ascribes the strange dissentions that broke
out in the council of the amphyctions, and the
direful witchcraft that prevailed in the east country
—whereby the hostile machinations against the
Nederlanders were for a time frustrated, and his
favourite city of New Amsterdam, preserved from
imminent peril and deadly warfare. Darkness
and lowering superstition hung over the fair valleys
of the east; the pleasant banks of the Connecticut,
no longer echoed with the sounds of rustic gaiety;
direful phantoms and portentous apparitions were
seen in the air—gliding spectrums haunted every
wildbrook and dreary glen—strange voices, made by
viewless forms, were heard in desart solitudes—and
the border towns were so occupied in detecting and
punishing the knowing old women, that had produced
these alarming appearances, that for a while

the province of New Nederlandt and its inhabitants
were totally forgotten.

The great Peter therefore, finding that nothing
was to be immediately apprehended from his eastern
neighbours, turned himself about with a praiseworthy
vigilance that ever distinguished him, to put
a stop to the insults of the Swedes. These lossel
freebooters my attentive reader will recollect had
begun to be very troublesome towards the latter part
of the reign of William the Testy, having set the
proclamations of that doughty little governor at
naught, and put the intrepid Jan Jansen Alpendam
to a perfect non plus!

Peter Stuyvesant, however, as has already been
shewn, was a governor of different habits and turn
of mind—without more ado he immediately issued
orders for raising a corps of troops to be stationed
on the southern frontier, under the command of
brigadier general Jacobus Von Poffenburgh. This
illustrious warrior had risen to great importance
during the reign of Wihelmus Keift, and if histories
speak true, was second in command to the gallant
Van Curlet, when he and his ragged regiment were
inhumanly kicked out of Fort Good Hope by the
Yankees. In consequence of having been in such
a “memorable affair,” and of having received
more wounds on a certain honourable part that
shall be nameless, than any of his comrades, he was
ever after considered as a hero, who had “seen

some service.” Certain it is, he enjoyed the unlimited
confidence and friendship of William the
Testy; who would sit for hours and listen with
wonder to his gunpowder narratives of surprising
victories—he had never gained: and dreadful battles—from
which he had run away; and the governor
was once heard to declare that had he lived in
ancient times, he might unquestionably have claimed
the armour of Achilles—being not merely like
Ajax, a mighty blustering man of battle, but in the
cabinet a second Ulysses, that is to say, very valiant
of speech and long winded—all which, as nobody
in New Amsterdam knew aught of the ancient
heroes in question, passed totally uncontradicted.

It was tropically observed by honest old Socrates,
of hen-pecked memory, that heaven had infused
into some men at their birth a portion of intellectual
gold; into others of intellectual silver; while others
were bounteously furnished out with abundance of
brass and iron—now of this last class was undoubtedly
the great general Von Poffenburgh, and from
the great display he continually made, I am inclined
to think that dame nature, who will sometimes be
partial, had blessed him with enough of those
valuable materials to have fitted up a dozen ordinary
braziers. But what is most to be admired is, that he
contrived to pass off all his brass and copper upon
Wilhelmus Kieft, who was no great judge of base
coin, as pure and genuine gold. The consequence

was, that upon the resignation of Jacobus Van Curlet,
who after the loss of fort Goed Hoop retired
like a veteran general, to live under the shade of
his laurels, the mighty “copper captain” was promoted
to his station. This he filled with great
importance, always styling himself “commander
in chief of the armies of the New Netherlands;”
though to tell the truth the armies, or rather army,
consisted of a handful of half uniformed, hen
stealing, bottle bruizing raggamuffins.

Such was the character of the warrior appointed
by Peter Stuyvesant to defend his southern frontier,
nor may it be uninteresting to my reader to have a
glimpse of his person. He was not very tall, but
notwithstanding, a huge, full bodied man, whose
size did not so much arise from his being fat, as
windy; being so completely inflated with his own
importance, that he resembled one of those puffed
up bags of wind, which old Eolus, in an incredible
fit of generosity, gave to that vagabond warrior
Ulysses.

His dress comported with his character, for he
had almost as much brass and copper without, as
nature had stored away within—His coat was crossed
and slashed, and carbonadoed, with stripes of
copper lace, and swathed round the body with a
crimson sash, of the size and texture of a fishing
net, doubtless to keep his valiant heart from bursting
through his ribs. His head and whiskers were pro

fusely powdered, from the midst of which his full
blooded face glowed like a fiery furnace; and his
magnanimous soul seemed ready to bounce out at
a pair of large glassy blinking eyes, which projected
like those of a lobster.

I swear to thee, worthy reader, if report belie
not this great general, I would give half my fortune
(which at this moment is not enough to pay
the bill of my landlord) to have seen him accoutered
cap-a-pie, in martial array—booted to the
middle—sashed to the chin—collared to the ears—
whiskered to the muzzle—crowned with an overshadowing
cocked-hat, and girded with a leathern
belt ten inches broad, from which trailed a faulchion
of a length that I dare not mention.

Thus equipped, he strutted about, as bitter looking
a man of war as the far-famed More of More
Hall, when he sallied forth, armed at all points, to
slay the Dragon of Wantley—

Notwithstanding all the great endowments and
transcendent qualities of this renowned general, I
must confess he was not exactly the kind of man
that the gallant Peter the Headstrong would have
chosen to command his troops—but the truth is, that
in those days the province did not abound, as at present,
in great military characters; who like so many
Cincinnatuses people every little village—marshalling
out cabbages, instead of soldiers, and signalizing
themselves in the corn field, instead of the
field of battle. Who have surrendered the toils of
war, for the more useful but inglorious arts of
peace, and so blended the laurel with the olive, that
you may have a general for a landlord, a colonel
for a stage driver, and your horse shod by a valiant
“captain of volunteers”—Neither had the great
Stuyvesant an opportunity of choosing, like modern
rulers, from a loyal band of editors of newspapers—
no mention being made in the histories of the times,
of any such class of mercenaries, being retained in
pay by government, either as trumpeters, champions,
or body guards. The redoubtable general
Von Poffenburgh, therefore, was appointed to the
command of the new levied troops; chiefly because
there were no competitors for the station, and partly
because it would have been a breach of military
etiquette, to have appointed a younger officer over
his head—an injustice, which the great Peter would
rather have died than have committed.

No sooner did this thrice valiant copper captain
receive marching orders, than he conducted
his army undauntedly to the southern frontier;
through wild lands and savage deserts; over insurmountable
mountains, across impassable floods
and through impenetrable forests; subduing a vast
tract of uninhabited country, and overturning, discomfiting
and making incredible slaughter of certain
hostile hosts of grass-hoppers, toads and pismires,
which had gathered together to oppose his
progress—an achievement unequalled in the pages
of history, save by the farfamed retreat of old
Xenephon and his ten thousand Grecians. All
this accomplished, he established on the South (or
Delaware) river, a redoubtable redoubt, named
Fort Casimer, in honour of a favourite pair of
brimstone coloured trunk breeches of the governor's.
As this fort will be found to give rise to
very important and interesting events, it may be
worth while to notice that it was afterwards called
Neiuw Amstel, and was the original germ of the
present flourishing town of New Castle, an appellation
erroneously substituted for No Castle,
there neither being, nor ever having been a castle,
or any thing of the kind upon the premises.

The Swedes did not suffer tamely this menacing
movement of the Nederlanders; on the contrary
Jan Printz, at that time governor of New
Sweden, issued a sturdy protest against what he

termed an encroachment upon his jurisdiction.—
But the valiant Von Poffenburgh had become too
well versed in the nature of proclamations and protests,
while he served under William the Testy,
to be in any wise daunted by such paper warfare.
His fortress being finished, it would have done
any man's heart good to behold into what a magnitude
he immediately swelled. He would stride in
and out a dozen times a day, surveying it in front
and in rear; on this side and on that.—Then would
he dress himself in full regimentals, and strut backwards
and forwards, for hours together, on the top
of his little rampart—like a vain glorious cock
pidgeon vapouring on the top of his coop. In a
word, unless my readers have noticed, with curious
eye, the petty commander of a little, snivelling,
military post, swelling with all the vanity
of new regimentals, and the pomposity derived
from commanding a handful of tatterdemalions,
I despair of giving them any adequate idea of
the prodigious dignity of general Von Poffenburgh.

It is recorded in the delectable romance of
Pierce Forest, that a young knight being dubbed
by king Alexander, did incontinently gallop into an
adjoining forest, and belaboured the trees with such
might and main, that the whole court were convinced
that he was the most potent and courageous
gentleman on the face of the earth. In like manner

the great general Von Poffenburgh would ease
off that valourous spleen, which like wind is so apt
to grow unruly in the stomachs of new made soldiers,
impelling them to box-lobby brawls, and broken
headed quarrels.—For at such times, when he
found his martial spirit waxing hot within him, he
would prudently sally forth into the fields, and lugging
out his trusty sabre, of full two flemish ells in
length, would lay about him most lustily, decapitating
cabbages by platoons—hewing down whole
phalanxes of sunflowers, which he termed gigantic
Swedes; and if peradventure, he espied a colony of
honest big bellied pumpkins quietly basking themselves
in the sun, “ah caitiff Yankees,” would he
roar, “have I caught ye at last!”—so saying, with
one sweep of his sword, he would cleave the unhappy
vegetables from their chins to their waistbands:
by which warlike havoc, his choler being in some
sort allayed, he would return to his garrison with a
full conviction, that he was a very miracle of military
prowess.

The next ambition of general Von Poffenburgh
was to be thought a strict disciplinarian. Well
knowing that discipline is the soul of all military
enterprize, he enforced it with the most rigorous
precision; obliging every man to turn out his toes,
and hold up his head on parade, and prescribing the
breadth of their ruffles to all such as had any shirts
to their backs.

Having one day, in the course of his devout researches
in the bible, (for the pious Eneas himself,
could not exceed him in outward religion) encountered
the history of Absalom and his melancholy
end; the general in an evil hour, issued orders for
cropping the hair of both officers and men throughout
the garrison. Now it came to pass, that among
his officers was one Kildermeester; a sturdy old
veteran, who had cherished through the course of a
long life, a rugged mop of hair, not a little resembling
the shag of a Newfoundland dog; terminating
with an immoderate queue, like the handle of
a frying pan; and queued so tightly to his head,
that his eyes and mouth generally stood ajar, and
his eye-brows were drawn up to the top of his forehead.
It may naturally be supposed that the possessor
of so goodly an appendage would resist with
abhorrence, an order condemning it to the shears.
Sampson himself could not have held his wig more
sacred, and on hearing the general orders, he discharged
a tempest of veteran, soldier-like oaths,
and dunder and blixums—swore he would break any
man's head who attempted to meddle with his tail—
queued it stiffer than ever, and whisked it about
the garrison, as fiercely as the tail of a crocodile.

The eel-skin queue of old Kildermeester, became
instantly an affair of the utmost importance. The
commander in chief was too enlightened an officer
not to perceive, that the discipline of the garrison,

the subordination and good order of the armies of
the Nieuw Nederlandts, the consequent safety of
the whole province, and ultimately the dignity and
prosperity of their high mightinesses, the lords
states general, but above all, the dignity of the
great general Von Poffenburgh, all imperiously demanded
the docking of that stubborn queue. He
therefore patriotically determined that old Kildermeester
should be publicly shorn of his glories in
presence of the whole garrison—the old man as resolutely
stood on the defensive—whereupon the
general, as became a great man, was highly exasperated,
and the offender was arrested and tried
by a court martial for mutiny, desertion and all the
other rigmarole of offences noticed in the articles of
war, ending with a “videlicit, in wearing an eel-skin
queue, three feet long, contrary to orders”—Then
came on arraignments, and trials, and pleadings,
and convictings, and the whole country was in a
ferment about this unfortunate queue. As it is
well known that the commander of a distant frontier
post has the power of acting pretty much after his
own will, there is little doubt but that the old veteran
would have been hanged or shot at least, had he
not luckily fallen ill of a fever, through mere chagrin
and mortification—and most flagitiously deserted
from all earthly command, with his beloved
locks unviolated. His obstinacy remained unshaken
to the very last moment, when he directed that
he should be carried to his grave with his eel-skin
queue sticking out of a knot hole in his coffin.

This magnanimous affair obtained the general
great credit as an excellent disciplinarian, but it is
hinted that he was ever after subject to bad dreams,
and fearful visitations in the night—when the grizly
spectrum of old Kildermeester would stand centinel
by his bed side, erect as a pump, his enormous
queue strutting out like the handle.