Dutch and English on the Hudson: A Chronicle of Colonial New York

by Maud Wilder Goodwin

In the interval between Minuit's departure and the arrival of Van Twiller, the reins of authority were held by Sebastian Krol, whose name is memorable chiefly for the fact that he had been influential in purchasing the domain of Rensselaerswyck for its patroon (1630) and the tradition that the cruller, crolyer or krolyer, was so called in his honor. The Company's selection of a permanent successor to Minuit was not happy. Wouter Van Twiller, nephew of Kiliaen Van Rensselaer, must have owed his appointment as Director to family influence, since neither his career nor his reputation justified the choice.

David de Vries, writing on April 16, 1633, notes that on arriving about noon before Fort Amsterdam he found there a ship called the Soutbergh which had brought over the new Governor, Wouter Van Twiller, a former clerk in the West India House at Amsterdam. De Vries gives his opinion of Van Twiller in no uncertain terms. He expressed his own surprise that the West India Company should send fools into this country who knew nothing except how to drink, and quotes an Englishman as saying that he could not understand the unruliness among the officers of the Company and that a governor should have no more control over them.

For the personal appearance of this "Walter the Doubter," we must turn again to the testimony of Knickerbocker, whose mocking descriptions have obtained a quasi-historical authority:

This renowned old gentleman arrived at New Amsterdam in the merry month of June.... He was exactly five feet six inches in height and six feet five inches in circumference. His head was a perfect sphere and of such stupendous dimensions that Dame Nature, with all her sex's ingenuity would have been puzzled to construct a neck capable of supporting it: Wherefore she wisely declined the attempt and settled it firmly on the top of his backbone just between the shoulders.... His legs were short but sturdy in proportion to the weight they had to sustain so that when erect he had not a little the appearance of a beer barrel on skids. His face, that infallible index of the mind, presented a vast expanse, unfurrowed by any of those lines which disfigure the human countenance with what is termed expression.... His habits were regular. He daily took his four stated meals, appropriating exactly an hour to each; he smoked and doubted eight hours, and he slept the remaining twelve of the four-and-twenty.

A later historian, taking up the cudgels in behalf of the Director, resents Knickerbocker's impeachment and protests that "so far from being the aged, fat and overgrown person represented in caricature Van Twiller was youthful and inexperienced, and his faults were those of a young man unused to authority and hampered by his instructions."[[1]]

In his new office Van Twiller was confronted with questions dealing with the encroachment of the patroons from within and of the English from without, the unwelcome visit of Eelkens, of whom we shall hear later, and massacres by the Indians on the South River. Such problems might well have puzzled a wiser head and a more determined character than Van Twiller's. We cannot hold him wholly blameworthy if he dealt with them in a spirit of doubt and hesitation. What we find harder to excuse is his shrewd advancement of his own interests and his lavish expenditure of the Company's money. The cost of building the fort was more than justifiable. To have neglected the defenses would have been culpable; and the barracks built for the hundred and four soldiers whom he had brought over from the Fatherland may also be set down as necessary. But when the Company was groaning under the expenses of the colony, it was, to say the least, lacking in tact to build for himself the most elaborate house in New Netherland, besides erecting on one of the Company's bouweries a house, a barn, a boathouse, and a brewery, to say nothing of planting another farm with tobacco, working it with slave labor at the Company's expense, and appropriating the profits. In the year 1688, after he had been five years in office, the outcry against Van Twiller for misfeasance, malfeasance, and especially nonfeasance, grew too loud to be ignored, and he was recalled; but before he left New Netherland he bought Nooten or Nut Island, since called Governor's Island, and also two other islands in the East River. At the time of his marriage in 1643, Van Twiller was in command of a competence attained at the expense of the West India Company, and there is much excuse for the feeling of his employers that he had been more active in his own affairs than in theirs.

The principal service which he had rendered to the Company in his term of office was the establishment of "staple right" at New Amsterdam, compelling all ships trading on the coast or the North River to pay tolls or unload their cargoes on the Company's property. But on the reverse side of the account we must remember that he allowed the fort to fall into such decay that when Kieft arrived in 1638 he found the defenses, which had been finished only three years before, already in a shamefully neglected condition, the guns dismounted, the public buildings inside the walls in ruins, and the walls of the fort itself so beaten down that any one might enter at will, "save at the stone point."

The hopes of the colonists rose again with the coming of a new governor; but the appointment of Kieft reflected as little credit as that of Van Twiller upon the sagacity of the West India Company. The man now chosen to rule New Netherland was a narrow-minded busybody, eager to interfere in small matters and without the statesmanship required to conduct large affairs. Some of his activities, it is true, had practical value. He fixed the hours at which the colonists should go to bed and ordered the curfew to be rung at nine o'clock; he established two annual fairs to be held on the present Bowling Green, one in October for cattle and one in November for hogs; and he built a new stone church within the fort, operated a brewery, founded a hostelry, and planted orchards and gardens. But on the other side of the account he was responsible for a bloody war with the Indians which came near to wrecking the colony.

His previous record held scant promise for his success as a governor. He had failed as a merchant in Rochelle, for which offense his portrait had been affixed to a gallows. Such a man was a poor person to be put in control of the complicated finances of New Netherland and of the delicate relations between the colonists and the Indians—relations calling for infinite tact, wisdom, firmness, and forbearance.