Wilhelmus Kieft was a great legislator on a small scale, and had a microscopic eye in public affairs. He had been greatly annoyed by the factious meetings of the good people of New Amsterdam, but, observing that on these occasions the pipe was ever in their mouth, he began to think that the pipe was at the bottom of the affair, and that there was some mysterious affinity between politics and tobacco smoke. Determined to strike at the root of the evil, he began, forthwith, to rail at tobacco as a noxious, nauseous weed, filthy in all its uses; and as to smoking, he denounced it as a heavy tax upon the public pocket, a vast consumer of time, a great encourager of idleness, and a deadly bane to the prosperity and morals of the people. Finally, he issued an edict prohibiting the smoking of tobacco throughout the New Netherlands. Ill-fated Kieft! Had he lived in the present age and attempted to check the unbounded license of the press, he could not have struck more sorely upon the sensibilities of the million. The pipe, in fact, was the great organ of reflection and deliberation of the New Netherlander. It was his constant companion and solace: was he gay, he smoked; was he sad, he smoked; his pipe was never out of his mouth; it was a part of his physiognomy; without it his best friends would not know him. Take away his pipe? You might as well take away his nose!
The immediate effect of the edict of William the Testy was a popular commotion. A vast multitude, armed with pipes and tobacco boxes and an immense supply of ammunition, sat themselves down before the governor’s house and fell to smoking with tremendous violence. The Testy William issued forth like a wrathful spider, demanding the reason of this lawless fumigation. The sturdy rioters replied by lolling back in their seats and puffing away with redoubled fury, raising such a murky cloud that the governor was fain to take refuge in the interior of his castle.
A long negotiation ensued through the medium of Antony the Trumpeter. The governor was at first wrathful and unyielding, but was gradually smoked into terms. He concluded by permitting the smoking of tobacco, but he abolished the fair long pipes used in the days of Wouter Van Twiller, denoting ease, tranquillity and sobriety of deportment; these he condemned as incompatible with the dispatch of business; in place whereof he substituted little captious short pipes, two inches in length, which he observed could be stuck in one corner of the mouth or twisted in the hat-band, and would never be in the way. Thus ended this alarming insurrection, which was long known by the name of The Pipe Plot, and which, it has been somewhat quaintly observed, did end, like most plots and seditions, in mere smoke.
But mark, O reader! the deplorable evils which did afterward result. The smoke of these villainous little pipes, continually ascending in a cloud about the nose, penetrated into and befogged the cerebellum, dried up all the kindly moisture of the brain, and rendered the people who used them as vaporish and testy as the governor himself. Nay, what is worse, from being goodly, burly, sleek-conditioned men, they became, like our Dutch yeomanry who smoke short pipes, a lantern-jawed, smoke-dried, leathern-hided race.
Nor was this all. From this fatal schism we may date the rise of parties in Nieuw Nederlandts. The rich burghers, who could afford to be lazy, adhered to the ancient fashion and were known as Long Pipes; while the lower order were branded with the plebeian name of Short Pipes.
PETER THE HEADSTRONG
Peter Stuyvesant was the last, and, like the renowned Wouter Van Twiller, the best, of our ancient Dutch governors, Wouter having surpassed all who preceded him, and Pieter or Piet, as he was sociably called by the old Dutch burghers, who were ever prone to familiarize names, having never been equalled by any successor. He was, in fact, the very man fitted by Nature to retrieve the desperate fortunes of her beloved province, had not the fates, those most potent and unrelenting of all ancient spinsters, destined them to inextricable confusion.