The Shame and the Sorrow: Dutch-Amerindian Encounters in New Netherland. By Donna Merwick, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2006, pp.332, $US 49.95 (cloth).
This review was originally published in Australasian Journal of American Studies 25, no. 2 (Dec. 2006), 114-117.
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The Shame and the Sorrow: Dutch-Amerindian Encounters in New Netherland
Donna Merwick
Reviewed by Michael A. McDonnell, University of Sydney
Let me start where Donna Merwick ends, with the words of Jacob Alrich, a Dutch merchant involved in the establishment of New Amstel (New Castle, Delaware): 'Little is thought here of the inhabitants or natives.... [W]e' 11 keep ourselves peaceful toward them.' Merwick urges us to see this as metaphoric of the intentions of the Netherlanders during their stay in North America. The Dutch had no desire to impose themselves upon the indigenous populations they encountered in the New World. Yet, the benign thoughtlessness inherent in seventeenth-century overseas encounters inevitably undermined peaceful intentions. The Dutch would be no more successful in establishing peaceful relations with indigenous peoples in the Americas than anyone else. They would, though, regret their failure more than most. In this her third major book on early America, Merwick confronts head-on the question that seems to have niggled at her in Possessing Albany, 1630- 1710: The Dutch and English Experiences (1990) and Death of a Notary: Conquest and Change in Colonial New York (1999). The Dutch clearly brought a very different mindset to their colonising ventures than their European neighbours. Yet they ended up enmeshing themselves in the same kind of cycles of violence and destruction that plagued most encounters between western and indigenous peoples in this period. Dutch elites, at least, came not to possess, but to trade. And yet they conquered. They came with tolerant, pluralistic, and antimilitaristic notions. And yet they undermined native cultures and waged destructive war on the peoples they encountered. They discussed, debated, and worried about these destabilising encounters. And yet they continued.
To understand this complex process, Merwick keeps us connected across the Atlantic and aware of the European world of the Dutch. Drawing on a mastery of the sources that illuminate the Netherlands in the seventeenth century, she shows us that the Netherlanders' first steps out into a wider world were invariably shaped by their domestic concerns. They were, first and foremost, a coastal people by nature - an 'alongshore' people - used to living on the edges of sea and of land, and their encounters with new peoples would be shaped by this maritime predisposition. They were also an urban, commercial people. And they were also a people accustomed to, yet heartily weary, of war. At least a century of brutal conflicts had sickened the Netherlanders, and they were still in the midst of a struggle for independence against the domination of Spain when they launched their own maritime empire. Theirs would not be a centralising, conquering empire, and their own struggle for sovereignty at home would shape debates about encounters with others. The shadow of Spain loomed large. Merwick then reads the history of Dutch encounters with the Algonquian peoples they met in the New World through the lens of this illuminating metaphor of 'alongshore-ness'. With trade their primary concern, they needed only make contact at the water's edge - along the extensive coastlines, and at tiny outposts that served as market places. They also thought, with Jacob Alrich, that they need not worry themselves too much about those with whom they traded. Indeed, the Dutch often seemed to regard Indians with indifference - unlike other contemporary colonising nations who were obsessed with Indians precisely because they saw them as allies, converts, labour, or owners of coveted lands. But the Dutch were slowly, inexorably, drawn 'inland' almost despite themselves. 'Across porous boundaries of exchange,' Merwick notes, 'unanticipated cultural entanglement occurs' (p. 60).
Introduced diseases destabilised native societies at the same time competing European powers complicated local Indian politics. Competition for trade also fuelled or exacerbated inter-tribal warfare. Native groups, capitalising on divisions among the Dutch, sometimes compelled the Netherlanders to get involved in these conflicts, forcing the Dutch metaphorically inland. Problems communicating, cultural misunderstandings and inevitably, alcohol, all contributed to this increasing entanglement. Indeed, in the same wonderfully nuanced way that she detailed the cultural misunderstandings between the English and Dutch after 1665, Merwick traces the slow, painful deterioration of relations between the New Netherlanders and the indigenous people in the area. The 'slide inland' culminated in a ferocious war between 1640 and 1645 that involved at least twelve Algonquian- speaking peoples living near Manhattan Island. In recounting this war, Merwick is, as usual, remarkably honest about the sources she uses, and the limits of what we can know about it. Indeed, throughout the book, Merwick pays as much attention to the gaps, silences, and omissions in the sources as she does to the context in which they were constructed. Invariably, Merwick teases out insights from these problematic sources, but they do not illuminate the obvious. There is a recognition, for example, that accounts of the brutal war of 1640-1645 were merely constructions, not accurate reports - and the context and connections she makes with events elsewhere force us to see that all these stories were shaped far across the Atlantic world, and spoke about Europe as much as events in America. Merwick is honest, too, about the fact that invariably, her book is more about the Dutch in the Americas than the peoples they encountered. She professes no special insight into the Amerindian world into which they stumbled. She is wary of accounts of understanding, and emphasises the unknowingness of motives - on both sides. It was, she notes 'a landscape of deceit' (p. 250). The war would haunt the Dutch, and would shape the rest of their American enterprise until the English took over the colony in 1664. And it is in the final chapters that Merwick's 'history of an emotion' - shame - comes most forcefully into play. As the Dutch were drawn even further inland, and increasingly came into conflict with Indians over land, local officials especially were desperate to avoid further bloodshed. They spilled much ink trying to understand what might constitute a 'just war', even as they quietly acknowledged the shame of their failure to maintain peaceful relations. Leaders at least continued to debate what went wrong even as conflicts between different groups of natives and newcomers multiplied. And the Dutch in particular seem to have continued this debate, and to judge themselves harshly, even to today. Merwick does not stand in judgement. She is an historian of this soul-searching. In the end, Merwick is unafraid of 'weighing up' the evidence carefully to recapture the 'moral murkiness' that dominated seventeenth-century Netherlanders' efforts. Quoting Frances Gouda who spoke of trying to recover the reality of the Dutch East Indies society, Merwick notes: “Historians must read in between the lines of every narrative and apply personal, moral judgments, even if the images they are impelled to construct reveal a murky mixture of black and white." Inevitably, such conclusions invite comparisons, particularly with the contemporaneous English efforts to the north and south of the Netherlanders. Merwick's work is implicitly and, at times, explicitly comparative. But she also points to the need for greater inter-imperial comparisons. It is clear that something very different was happening across artificial imperial borders. The boisterous and aggressive confidence that seems to characterise early English colonists seems missing among the anxiety-ridden Dutch. It is also clear that most distinctions originated at home, borne of the very different recent experiences of the expanding nations. Whereas most European states exported war, the Dutch exported their alongshoreness. But Merwick's careful reading of the early Dutch narratives of expansion also raises other questions. Would we read early English accounts of encounters, trade, and settlement in a more uncertain light had they given up their efforts in North America in 1664? Ultimately, Merwick's beautifully crafted work also adds detailed weight to the work of a growing number of intellectual historians such as Andrew Fitzmaurice (Humanism in America, 2003) who have reconstructed a world in which colonialism was in doubt - in question. Though she is careful to note the fine line separating weakness and morality in Dutch debates over just wars, we do get an overwhelming sense that at least some of the colonising Dutch were unsure of the legitimacy of their overseas enterprises. At the very least, we certainly get a sense of the hesitancy and uncertainty of the colonisers; and more generally, the tenuousness and 'structurelessness' of relations between natives and newcomers (p. 222). Significantly, this does not exonerate the colonisers in any way. Rather, it makes more doubtful our own specious claims that European colonisers did not know any better - could do no better.