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Adriaen van der Donck: A Dutch Rebel in Seventeenth-Century America, by J Van Den Hout. Adraien van der Donck is best-remembered now as the "Jonkheer" who gave his name to the city of Yonkers, New York. I first got interested in him about ten years ago, after chatting with a history buff sitting next to me on the Amtrak along the Hudson river. I looked van Der Donck up on Wikipedia, and was intrigued, particularly by the bit where, returning to New Netherland after an unsuccessful attempt to get Peter Stuyvesant removed from office, he was banned from practicing law because there was no one of "sufficient ability and the necessary qualifications" to equal him. This read to my reading The Island at the Center of the World by Russell Shorto, which is basically the epic history of the Dutch colonization of New York that Isaac Asimov somehow never wrote but should have.
Recently, I went back to van der Donck's Wikipedia page and saw that there was a new biography out about him, which I snapped up. It's well-researched, and if you want the glossy recruiting brochure for 17th century Leiden University it's all there (no, really, the best humanists from all over Europe, world class facilities like this library, and vibrant extracurricular student life!). It's all very readable, but in the end a bit unsatisfying -- partly, I think, because it doesn't contextualize the issues around colonialism particularly well. But also because reading history can be fundamentally unsatisfying, because there's a lot that we just don't know -- we don't have much documentation of van der Donck's early life before he applied for a job in New Netherland, so we get the glossy college brochure instead -- and on the other end, we don't know the details of his death either, though there's circumstantial evidence that he was killed in war with a local Native American tribe (the sort of thing he was trying to prevent!). Hm, I wonder if there is any historical fiction about van der Donck (you could have fun with him faking his death for some reason or another).
Anyway, this book is for van der Donck completists, otherwise you'd probably rather read The Island at the Center of the World.
Recently, I went back to van der Donck's Wikipedia page and saw that there was a new biography out about him, which I snapped up. It's well-researched, and if you want the glossy recruiting brochure for 17th century Leiden University it's all there (no, really, the best humanists from all over Europe, world class facilities like this library, and vibrant extracurricular student life!). It's all very readable, but in the end a bit unsatisfying -- partly, I think, because it doesn't contextualize the issues around colonialism particularly well. But also because reading history can be fundamentally unsatisfying, because there's a lot that we just don't know -- we don't have much documentation of van der Donck's early life before he applied for a job in New Netherland, so we get the glossy college brochure instead -- and on the other end, we don't know the details of his death either, though there's circumstantial evidence that he was killed in war with a local Native American tribe (the sort of thing he was trying to prevent!). Hm, I wonder if there is any historical fiction about van der Donck (you could have fun with him faking his death for some reason or another).
Anyway, this book is for van der Donck completists, otherwise you'd probably rather read The Island at the Center of the World.