The Journal of Jasper Danckaerts Notes

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Overview	Our Voyage to New Netherland	Journal of our Travels	Notes
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Notes for The Journal of Jasper Danckaerts:

¹ Margaret Filipse. See footnote 7.

² The manor-house of Thetinga, at Wieuwerd in Friesland, about seven miles southwest of Leeuwarden. By walking to Oosterend and a little beyond one found, as the canals then lay, a canal route to the Zuider Zee. The diarist, it will be observed, refrains from naming the place, and gives only the beginnings of the place-names mentioned just below.

³ The chronology needs explanation. Thursday, June 8, 1679, new style (which was the style our travellers observed), was May 29, old style, and May 29, old style, was Ascension Day, the keepers of old style observing Easter this year on (their) April 20, though the keepers of new style observed it on (their) April 2. The new style had been adopted by the province of Holland in 1582, immediately upon its promulgation by Pope Gregory XIII., but in Friesland and the other provinces of the Dutch Republic the old style continued to prevail until 1700.

⁴ The chief executive officer of a Dutch town.

⁵ A port on the west coast of Friesland, where they took the packet to cross the Zuider Zee to Amsterdam.

⁶ An important commercial town in North Holland, on the chief point they would pass on the west side of the Zuider Zee.

⁷ Margaret Philipse. Frederick Philipse (1626-1702), who in 1674 was listed as the richest man in New York, and later owned the great Philipse manor and was for twenty years a member of the governor''s council, had in 1662 married Margaret, widow of Pieter Rudolph de Vries, herself a well-to-do and enterprising merchant. She was the daughter of Adolf Hardenbroek of Bergen, and died before 1692. It is not necessary to accept in toto the diarist''s estimate of her.

⁸ i.e., if they were not Labadists of Wieuwerd.

⁹ The Y (now spelled Ij) is the river or inlet on which Amsterdam is situated. Buiksloot and Nieuwendam are suburban places on its north side.

¹⁰ The Voetians and the Cocceians were at this time the leading theological parties in the Reformed Church of the Netherlands. Gysbertus Voetius (1589-1676), professor of theology at Utrecht, was the pietistic, rigidly orthodox Calvinist; at first favorable to Labadie as to a man of earnest zeal to increase piety in the church, he turned against him as Labadie developed into separatism. Johannes Cocceius (1603-1669), professor at Leiden and one of the chief exponents of the "federal" theology (theology of covenants), represented a school more liberal in tendency and freer in exegesis, though still closely Biblical. Our travellers approved neither group.

¹¹ A large island at the mouth of the Zuider Zee. Ships outgoing to America would pass between it and the Helder, or extreme north point of North Holland.

¹² The Labadists had dwelt at Altona, in Holstein, then Danish, from 1672 to their removal to Wieuwerd in 1675. Labadie died there.

¹³ No doubt the allusion is to Antoinette Bourignon and her conventicles. Mile. Boiu-ignon (1616-1680), born in Lille, France, was a mystical enthusiast of tendencies not dissimilar from those of Labadie. Like him she wrote much, had temporarily a great vogue, and removed with her followers from place to place ‚Äî Amsterdam, Schleswig, Holstein, Hamburg, East Friesland, Friesland. Their congregation was at Hamburg when the Labadists were at Altona, close by, and was now at Franeker, not far from Wieuwerd. Efforts had at first been made toward union, but by this time there was open opposition between the two sects. The "assembly of Mr. B." means the conventicle maintained at Amsterdam by a merchant named Bardowitz or Bardewisch. He had been one of the foremost followers of Labadie, had interpreted his discourses into Dutch for those who did not understand French, and when Labadie retired to Herford in 1670 had been left in charge of that portion of the congregation which remained in Amsterdam. There he for many years, without pretending to be a minister, held a conventicle of separatists in his own house.

¹⁴ Sluyter.

¹⁵ The southern extremity of a great shoal near the mouth of the Zuider Zee, northeast of the island of Wieringen. "Under the Vlieter" would mean at the east side of this shoal, in the Tesselstroom or channel to the Texel.

¹⁶ A village on the east side of the Texel.

¹⁷ 1 Peter v. 6.

¹⁸ Near the middle of the island.

¹⁹ Or Mennonite. Their sect, largely Dutch, were followers of Menno Simons (1492-1559), refraining from military service, oaths, and public office. It sprang from among the Baptists of the Reformation period, and had much in common with the Society of Friends in the period of the present book

²⁰ Still another Oosterend, at the east point of the Texel.

²¹ The main channel past the Texel.

²² Jan is not otherwise known to us, though apparently he had, or had had, some connection with the Labadist community which made his name familiar to their agents.

²³ Falmouth, England.

²⁴ Jacob Boehme (1575-1624), a pious German shoemaker, author of many noted mystical writings

²⁵ We are left to infer that Margaret Philipse also, like Jan, had some relation to the Labadists, and perhaps that she had just visited them. But her husband, Frederick Philipse, was a native of the town of Bolsward, mentioned above, and she may therefore have gone there.

²⁶ These are channels leading out around the Helder, the Nieuwe Diep close to that cape on the inside, the Lands Diep close to it on the outside. Farther out lay the old channel and the Spaniard''s Channel.

²⁷ In this translation distances are stated in English miles.

²⁸ The Texel channel being the great western passage out from the Zuider Zee, the other or eastern passage was theVlie, lying on the other side of the great shoal known as the Bree Sand, and leading out between the islands of Vlieland and Schelling.

²⁹ A guilder or florin was equivalent to about 40 cents.

³⁰ West Friesland was the ancient name for the northern part of the province of Holland, Alkmaar one of its chief towns.

³¹ The westernmost island of the province of Zeeland.

³² Evert Duyckinck; see footnote 49.

³³ In the fragmentary manuscript journal of the voyage of 1683, Danckaerts notices, on land, between Canterbury and Dover, the same great abundance of beetles, which every evening fly out to sea from Dover in great numbers.

³⁴ A distorted rumor of the rising of the Covenanters in June, 1679; but everything was now seen in the light of the Popish Plot.

³⁵ Sandbanks off the southeast coast of England, called by the English the Galloper, the Whiting, and the Goodwin Sands.

³⁶ Beachy Head.

³⁷ Of Gibraltar.

³⁸ Durlston Head.

³⁹ A small long three-masted trading-ship.

⁴⁰ Start Point.

⁴¹ This dangerous reef was called by the Dutch Meeuwsteen (Sea-mews'' Rock), by the English Eddy stone. Of the lighthouses for which it has been celebrated, the first was begun in 1695.

⁴² Dodman Point.

⁴³ The southernmost point of Cornwall. Falmouth is about midway between it and Dodman Point.

⁴⁴ Falmouth, which had come into existence in 1613, numbered in 1679 some two hundred and fifty houses. The two castles alluded to as commanding the harbor were Pendennis castle on the west (southeast of the town), famous for its obstinate defence in 1646 by the royalists under Lord Arundell, and St. Mawes on the east.

⁴⁵ The custom house had lately been transferred to Falmouth from Penryn. Bryan Rogers was one of the chief merchants of the former.

⁴⁶ The new church at Falmouth, built by Sir Robert Killigrew. The sermon was probably from the Two Books of Homilies authorized by the Church.

⁴⁷ There was but one mayor.

⁴⁸ One of the Cape Verde islands.

⁴⁹ Evert Duyckinck was the son of a Westphahan painter and glazier of the same name who had come out to New Netherland early, in the service of the Dutch West India Company.

⁵⁰ Pendennis castle is meant. The governor was Richard, Lord Arundell of Trerice, son of the old governor who had commanded during the siege of 1646.

⁵¹ Robert Sinclair. Though he returned on the Charles, he came back to New York in 1682, married the sister of Evert Duyckinck, became a sea-captain, and died in 1704.

⁵² A gold coin of Holland, worth originally about two dollars and a half, but at this time less. It would apparently have been worth fifteen guilders of zeewan (wampum) in New Netherland.

⁵³ Jan Teunissen van Dykhuis, of Brooklyn.

⁵⁴ Twenty stivers made one florin or guilder, and three guilders one ducat.

⁵⁵ The Falmouth customs officers had the right, or opportunity by connivance of the government, to bring in some goods dutv-free.

⁵⁶ A Dutch silver coin, worth about $1.25.

⁵⁷ The Charles set sail from Falmouth the next day, July 21, 1679. The account of the voyage is here omitted. It is a somewhat interesting picture of the hardships, discomforts, and other incidents of an Atlantic voyage in the seventeenth century, but it is excessively long.

⁵⁸ Navesink.

⁵⁹ "Headlands," at the Narrows.

⁶⁰ Robert Sinclair.

⁶¹ Gerrit Evertsen van Duyn, carpenter and wheelwright, emigrated in 1649 from Nieuwerkerk in Zeeland, married Jacomina, daughter of Jacob Swarts Hellekers, lived mostly in New Utrecht and Flatbush, and died in 1706. He had returned to the Netherlands in 1670, but was now coming out for good.

⁶² The mate told him, September 1, off the Bermudas, that one never failed to have storms there; and that one dark night "it seemed as if the air was full of strange faces with wonderful eyes standing out of them" {cf. Shakespeare''s Tempest) ; and then he remembered to have read the same, in his youth, in a little book called De Silver Poort-Klock (The Silver Gate-Bell).

⁶³ Corsairs from North Africa, who at that time constantly infested the seas near England and concerning whom the narrative of the first part of the voyage shows frequent alarms.

⁶⁴ An anker was about ten gallons.

⁶⁵ Zwolle in the Netherlands.

⁶⁶ I.e., "black Jacob." His name was Jacob Hellekers, and his house, in which the Labadists lodged while in New York, stood where now stands no. 255 Pearl Street, near Fulton Street.

⁶⁷ Rev, Gideon Schaets was settled as pastor at Rensselaerwyck in 1652, later at Beverwyck and Albany, continuing in service there till he died in 1694, aged 86. Peter Tesschenmaker had come up from Dutch Guiana, and had supplied the pulpits at Esopus and at Newcastle on the South River (Delaware River), for about a year in each place. The history of his formal call, examination, ordination in October, 1679, and appointment, is set forth in Ecclesiastical Records of New York, I. 724-735. The only three other Dutch Reformed ministers in the province at this time were those named below: Rev. Wilhelmus van Nieuwenhuysen of New York (1672-d. 1681), Rev. Casparus van Zuuren of Flushing, Brooklyn, and Flatlands (1677-1685), and Rev. Laurentius Gaasbeeck of Esopus (1678-d. February, 1680).

⁶⁸ Pemaquid, on the coast of Maine, where this governor had built a fort in 1677, on territory embraced in the Duke of York's patent. The governor was Sir Edmund Andros (1674-1681). He visited Pemaquid in the autumn of 1679. He was of course nowise subordinate to the governor of Jamaica.

⁶⁹ Governor's Island.

⁷⁰ The inscription, on a stone extant till 1835, is here quoted almost literally. It ran, "Anno Domini 1642, W. Kieft, director general, has caused the commonalty to build this temple." Willem Kieft was director-general of New Netherland from 1638 to 1647. A plan of town and fort may be seen at p. 420 of Narratives of New Netherland, in this series.

⁷¹ Nieuwenhuysen. The text is in I Timothy v. 17, "Let the elders that rule well, be accounted worthy of double honor."

⁷² Rebecca, daughter of Jacob Hellekers's wife by her former husband, was married to Arie or Adrian Corneliszen, who had a license to sell wines and other liquors, and lived a little out of town, beyond the Fresh Water.

⁷³ Jean Vigné had in previous years been four times one of the schepens, or municipal councillors, of New Amsterdam. If he was born in New Netherland in or about 1614, there must have been at least one European woman in the colony at an earlier date than has been supposed, namely, back in the years of the first Dutch trading along that coast. But many things concerning the earliest years of New Netherland must remain in uncertainty until the publication of a certain group of documents of that period, evidently important, which were sold in 1910 by Muller of Amsterdam and are now in private possession in New York, and withheld from public knowledge.

⁷⁴ Abraham de la Noy was a schoolmaster. See footnote 103. Probably the writer means Peter de la Noy, who was clerk under the collector of the port. Later he was one of the chief supporters of Leisler.

⁷⁵ The Smith's Flats, a tract of low-lying land along the East River, outside the palisade of the town, and extending from present Wall Street to Beekman.

⁷⁶ Perhaps a reminiscence from the days (1671-1675) when the Labadists lived on the Elbe, at Altona.

⁷⁷ The stiver of Holland money was equivalent to two cents. Six white beads of wampum to the stiver was the rate established by authority in 1673.

⁷⁸ Arnoldus de la Grange and his wife Cornelia (Fonteyn), resident at this time in New York, removed soon after to Newcastle, on the Delaware River, where he had various tracts of land and where he in 1681 erected a windmill. In 1684-1685 he was concerned in the purchase from Augustine Herrman of land in Bohemia Manor for the Labadist settlement, and later is found as a member of their community.

⁷⁹ Delaware River.

⁸⁰ Beeren Eylandt, afterward called Barren Island, lay east of Coney Island, between it and Jamaica Bay. Vlaeck means "the flat."

⁸¹ Less than half a cent.

⁸² The second church building in Brooklyn, erected in 1666, and standing till 1766. It stood in the middle of what is now Fulton Street, near Lawrence Street Gowanus was a distinct hamlet to the southward from Breukelen.

⁸³ French of the Walloon variety. See footnote 118.

⁸⁴ Striped bass and shad, respectively. In reality the word elft has nothing to do with eleven, for elft = Fr. alose or Eng. allice.

⁸⁵ This settler was Simon Aertsen De Hart, who came to New Netherland in 1664 and settled at Gowanus Cove. The house in which he entertained the travellers was till lately still standing, near Thirty-ninth Street, west of Third Avenue, Brooklyn, but was destroyed to make room for the terminal buildings of the Thirty-ninth Street ferry. A picture of it as it appeared in 1867 is plate XII. in Mr. Murphy's edition of this journal.

⁸⁶ Thirty cents.

⁸⁷ Shake-down, bed on the floor.

⁸⁸ Pronounced Nyack; the region around the present site of Fort Hamilton, on the eastern side of the Narrows. It was at that time largely surrounded by a marsh and hence is referred to in the text as an island.

⁸⁹ Mica.

⁹⁰ Jacques Cortelyou. He came out from Utrecht as tutor to the children of Cornelis van Werckhoven, to whom this New Utrecht tract was first granted by the Dutch West India Company. He became the official surveyor of the province, made in 1660 a map of New Netherland, and founded New Utrecht, on Long Island, and a settlement in New Jersey.

⁹¹ There is probably here some confusion between the original grant to van Werckhoven and subsequent regrants to Cortelyou.

⁹² Follower of René Descartes (1596-1650), the celebrated French philosopher and mathematician, founder of Cartesianism and of modern philosophy in general.

⁹³ See Governor Andros's recommendation to the constables and overseers of Brooklyn to contribute to the relief of Cortelyou and the other inhabitants of New Utrecht, on account of their losses by fire, 1675, in Stiles, History of Brooklyn I. 198.

⁹⁴ This sketch is still preserved, accompanying the manuscript of this journal in the possession of the Long Island Historical Society. It bears the legend, in Dutch, "Views of the land on the south side and southwest side of the great bay between the Nevesincks and Long Island, six [Dutch] miles from New York. . . . All as it appears from . . . Jaques [blank]'s house at Najaq." It is reproduced as plate II. in Mr. Murphy's edition.

⁹⁵ Flatlands, where Elbert Elbertsen Stoothoff, father-in-law of Jan Theunissen, and a man of prominence, lived.

⁹⁶ Niewenhuisen.

⁹⁷ Gravesend, still farther down the south shore of Long Island.

⁹⁸ Flatbush.

⁹⁹ This may mean Surinam (Dutch Guiana). Later, in 1683, a Labadist colony went out to Surinam, but failed; Danckaerts went out to join them, but returned.

¹⁰⁰ Elbert Elbertsen.

¹⁰¹ Tincture of calamus; sulphur balsam, a mixture of olive oil and sublimed sulphur.

^102'' The Gradations of the Spiritual Life," by Theodorus à Brakel (1608-1699), an orthodox clergyman of note in the Reformed Church of Holland. Jacobus Koelman was originally a minister of the same church, in Zeeland, but became a schismatic and a Labadist and was forbidden to preach. In 1682 the people on the South River made much effort with the Classis of Amsterdam to have him sent over to be their minister, but in vain, and shortly after he left the Labadists, and in 1683 published a book against them. The book here spoken of was probably one of the works of Rev. John Brown of Wamphray in Scotland, written during his exile in Holland, 1663-1679.

¹⁰³ Abraham de la Noy seems to have taught in New York from 1668 to his death in 1702, conducting at this time a private school, but from 1686 serving as master of the Dutch parochial school.

¹⁰⁴ Named from Barent Blom, a settler. Later called Great and Little Barn Islands, now Ward's and Randall's Islands.

¹⁰⁵ Of Manhattan.

¹⁰⁶ The road was finished in 1673. Traced along the modern streets, it ran up Broadway, Park Row, the Bowery, Fourth Avenue (to Union Square), Broadway (to Madison Square), and then irregularly to the Harlem River at Third Avenue and 130th Street. The heights spoken of east (northeast) of the village of New Harlem were the present Mount Morris and Mott Haven

¹⁰⁷ So called because its main street ran through the farm or bouwery of Peter Stuyvesant.

¹⁰⁸ Or east.

¹⁰⁹ Resolved Waldron (1610-1690), elected constable in October, 1678. He was the chief man of the place, had been deputy fiscael of New Netherland in the time of Governor Stuyvesant, and held many provincial and local offices. In 1659 he and Augustine Herrman went to Maryland on an embassy for Stuyvesant; see its journal in Narratives of Early Maryland, in this series, pp. 309-333. Thus it may have been he who told Danckaerts and Sluyter of Herrman and of Bohemia Manor. It is almost certain that he never was in Brazil; but Hendrick Vander Vin, clerk and voorleser of Harlem, whom our travellers may have met at Waldron's house, had had an important official position there.

¹¹⁰ Catrix for Carteret. Captain James Carteret, son of Sir George Carteret, the proprietary of New Jersey, had commanded a ship at the reduction of St. Christopher in 1667, had come to New Jersey in 1671, and had allowed himself to be made leader of the malcontents in an uprising in that province in 1672. In 1673 he married the daughter of the mayor of New York, and set out for Carolina, where he was a ''landgrave," but returned to New York, and ultimately (1680) to Europe.

¹¹¹ The diarist is perhaps confusing the two Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey.

¹¹² Philip Carteret, a distant cousin, not a nephew, of Sir George, is the person here meant. He was appointed governor of New Jersey under the joint proprietorship of Lord Berkeley and Sir George Carteret, in 1664, and of East Jersey in 1674, under the sole grant to Sir George. He resigned in 1682, and died in December of that year, in this country. "This Carteret in England" means of course Sir George. The half of New Jersey called West New Jersey, first granted to Fenwick and Byllynge, came as a trust into the hands of Penn, Lawrie, and Lucas (see Narratives of Early Pennsylvania, West New Jersey, and Delaware, in this series, pp. 177-195), who used it for Quaker colonization.

¹¹³ The Palisades.

¹¹⁴ Valentine Claessen, whose sons took the surname of Valentine. He was a Saxon from Transylvania; his wife, Marritie Jacobs, was a Dutch woman, of Beest in Gelderland.

¹¹⁵ Walter Webley, nephew of Colonel Lewis Morris.

¹¹⁶ Greenwich.

¹¹⁷ In fact, about fourteen.

¹¹⁸ French-speaking persons from those provinces of the Low Countries then remaining under the rule of Spain, but now constituting the kingdom of Belgium.

¹¹⁹ The Oude Dorp (Old Town or Old Village) stood near the present South Beach on the east side of the island. The steep bluff spoken of was at what is now called Fort Wadsworth.

¹²⁰ Still called New Dorp; a village some two miles east of Richmond.

¹²¹ Menhaden.

¹²² Perhaps Christopher Billop of Bentley. The creeks next spoken of are Richmond Creek and Main Creek, which make well into the island from its west side.

¹²³ Pierre Cresson, a Picard, who after many years in Holland came out to New Netherland in 1657, and lived at Harlem till 1677, when he obtained this grant on Staten Island. His son Jacques embraced the Labadist views.

¹²⁴ I.e., behind the Kill van Kull. Mill Creek is probably the stream now known as Elizabethtown Creek.

¹²⁵ Now Shooter's Island, opposite Mariner's Harbor.

¹²⁶ This was the Rev. Charles Wolley, the only English minister then in the province. A graduate of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, he came out with Governor Andros in 1678 as chaplain to the garrison, and remained in New York till 1680. He published in 1701 (London, two editions) a pleasant though fragmentary little book entitled A Two Years Journal in New York, well worth reading in comparison with Danckaerts's account of the province. Two reprints of it have been issued (New York, 1860; Cleveland, 1902), the former edited by Dr. E. B. O'Callaghan, the latter by Professor Edward G. Bourne.

¹²⁷ Hackensack.

¹²⁸ The word, in the form neetup, has survived in local speech in some parts of New England. ''What cheer, neetup!" was the Indian's salutation to Roger Williams on his arrival at Seekonk.

¹²⁹ The chief (evil) spirit.

¹³⁰ Sachem, lord.

¹³¹Ephraim Herrman, eldest son of Augustine Herrman of Bohemia Manor, had on September 3, 1679, six weeks before this date, married Elizabeth Rodenburg, daughter of Lucas Rodenburg, formerly vice-director of Curacao. South River is the Delaware.

¹³² Communipaw, in New Jersey, founded in 1658. It is uncertain whether the name is of Indian origin (Gamoenipaen), or is a Dutch name made up from that of Pauw. The former is more likely.

¹³³ Jacques Fierens was from 1642 to 1669 a noteworthy printer, bookseller, and publisher at Middelburg in Zeeland, where Danckaerts then lived. Fierens's shop, as we know from other sources, was at the sign of the Globe in Gistraat or Giststraat (i. e., Heilige Geest Straat, Holy Ghost Street).

¹³⁴ In 1673, after the Duke of York and the English had held New York nine years, two Dutch commodores, Cornelis Evertsen and Jacob Binckes, retook it for the States General. The Dutch, however, held it only a year.

¹³⁵ Fytje Hartman, widow of Michael Jansen Hartman. She had seven children.

¹³⁶ Bergen was founded in 1661. Both it and Communipaw are now in Jersey City.

¹³⁷ Raccoon.

¹³⁸ Hackensack River.

¹³⁹ Immetie Dirx, widow of Frans Claesen.

¹⁴⁰Say three cents.

¹⁴¹Parish clerk, precentor, and (usually) schoolmaster. The church records of Bergen go back to 1664, and the first church edifice was built in the next year, 1680.

¹⁴² Now Constable's Point. Pavonia was the domain of Michael Pauw. Haverstraw lay well to the northward, Hackensack to the northwestward, of the Bergen peninsula.

¹⁴³ "The Town is compact and hath been fortified against the Indians." Captain Nicolls, in George Scot, The Model of the Government of East New Jersey, p. 142.

¹⁴⁴Jacques Cortelyou and his associates had a large grant of land at Aquackanonck (Passaic). Northwest Kill is the Passaic River.

¹⁴⁵ A morgen was about two acres.

¹⁴⁶ Deed of March 28, 1679, from the Indian sachem Captahem to a group of Bergen men.

¹⁴⁷ There were few Friends yet in New York, but on Long Island there were already quarterly and half-yearly meetings.

¹⁴⁸ Passaic.

¹⁴⁹ The Dutch translation of Jean de Labadie's Points Fondamentaux de la Vie vrayement Chrestienne (Amsterdam, 1670).

¹⁵⁰ Several very interesting pen-and-ink drawings accompany the manuscript of this journal. See the introduction to the volume.

¹⁵¹ Brooklyn, Flatbush, New Utrecht.

¹⁵² Large stationary net.

¹⁵³ The reference is to Governor Nicolls's code, commonly called the Duke's Laws, first promulgated in 1665, for Long Island and the Delaware River region, and reissued by Governor Lovelace in 1674. Copies were sent to each Long Island township, and thus to New Utrecht. The code was printed in 1809 in the first volume of the Collections of the New York Historical Society, and may also be found in a Pennsylvania issue, Charter to William Penn, etc. (Harrisburg, 1879).

¹⁵⁴ The Pensèes of Blaise Pascal had been published, posthumously, in 1670.

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Source: Overview and Edited by Bryan Wright

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