illustration from George O'Connor's Journey into Mohawk Country
New Netherlands, during the six decades of its existence in the 17th century, was generally more tolerant than the neighboring English Puritan settlement in Massachusetts, and had a commercial focus that has persisted through the centuries in New York. Here in the Hudson Valley our Calvinists were of a gentler strain than their co-religionists over in Salem and we experienced no frenzied pursuit of witches. And although the Dutch settlers had inherited laws from the old country making same sex relations a capital offense, the severest penalty appears to have been applied only twice, and then only when a child was abused. In 1646 “Jan Creoli, a Negro, was choked to death, and then burnt to ashes," while his ten year old victim, Manuel Congo, was merely flogged. In 1660, a soldier named Jan Quisthout was “tied in a sack and cast into the river and drowned until dead." Once again, his victim, a boy named Harmen Harmensen was whipped, but this time “privately.”
Harmen Meyndertz van den Bogaert, a nearly forgotten figure now, was the only prosperous and influential member of the New Netherlands colony known to have come into conflict with the ancient law. He was an explorer, a leading physician, a prosperous business man, and holder of high government office. And yet he was accused of the same crime as Creoli and Qusithout, and although he cheated the executioner, he also paid with his life.
It seems probable that the Dutch colonists only enforced the ancient anti-sodomy code when a dependent minor was involved, (Not they showed much sympathy for the victimized youth) and that whatever same sex relationships may have existed among consenting adults was ignored by officials. A cynic might speculate that even pederasty might not have always been prosecuted, if the offender were more highly placed than either of these two men. After all, Creoli was an African and Quisthout a common soldier. And Qusthout’s victim was also African.
And the fact that Harmen’s love life, if love is what it was, did not fall within this presumed liberty allowed to the upper class is puzzling. He may have simply aroused envy or hatred for other reasons. Or perhaps his fellow colonists did not care for his excessive devotion to the culture of the indigenous people who surrounded and far outnumbered the tiny Dutch colony. Whatever the reason, he died in disgrace and his name was long forgotten, while the governor in whose name he was arrested, Peter Stuyvesant, is revered here in New York. (Not least by NYC’s Stuyvesant High School where this writer once taught.)
Educated in his native Netherlands, Bogaert was already a surgeon/barber when he arrived in New Amsterdam about 1630. At some point thereafter, he moved up the Hudson to the busy trading post of Rensselaerwyck, now Albany. This village grew up around Fort Orange and was the center of the colony’s fur trade with the powerful Iroquois Confederacy. Equipped with muskets in exchange for furs, the Mohawks and their brother tribes ranged far north and west in pursuit of the precious beaver pelts.
Then in January, 1634 the native people suddenly stopped appearing at Rensselaerwyck with their furs, and the colonists panicked. Without the fur trade, the colony would lose its entire economic foundation. French interference was suspected, and someone needed to find out what had exactly had happened to the trade.
However, the inhabitants of Rensselaerwyck did not venture into Indian country, preferring to stay put in their little version of Holland, particularly in the dead of winter. In fact, they had not ventured west of Schenectady ever since 1626 when foolish Captain Van Krieckenbeeck sided with the Mohicans and ended up getting himself and his men killed and eaten by the Mohawks. (The Mohicans usually got the worst of it in their long running wars with the Mohawks and were declining in numbers and power throughout the century)
At this point Harmen, then about 22, volunteered to lead an expedition composed of himself and two other men. He ventured forth into the snow-covered forests and in doing so, became the first European to reach the Mohawk Valley and to be welcomed as a guest in a series of palisaded villages stretching along the river from near present-day Amsterdam to Utica.
Harmen kept a journal, which was lost for centuries before it was found among ancient records in the Netherlands. A new translation of the journal by Charles Gehring, director of the New Netherland Institute at the state museum, conveys a strong impression of Harmen’s lively curiosity and powers of observation. George O’Connor has produced a wonderful graphic novel of the journal which I highly recommend. (George, with the exception of myself, is the only writer to devote a book to Harmen.)
The journal offers some interesting grounds for speculation into the young explorer’s personality and interests. The glossary of the Mohawk language which he appended contains, interestingly, a number of explicitly sexual terms. Most importantly for his community, however, was that the journey was a great financial success. Harmen had restored the friendship with the dangerous Mohawks and the fur trade resumed.
After this auspicious beginning as a negotiator, Harmen rose rapidly in the colony’s small hierarchy. He invested in a piracy expedition, a popular business venture at the time, and owned a house on what is now Stone Street in Manhattan. He married a woman named Jilisje and had four children. He treated Isaac Jogues, the French missionary who was canonized as a Catholic saint, when he arrived at Rensselaerwyck after being tortured by the Mohawks, and Jogues describes Harmen’s kindness in his letters to his Jesuit superiors. After much success as a prosperous physician and trader, Harmen was named to the post of commissary, or business agent, at the military base of Fort Orange adjacent to Rensselaerwicjk.
This was a lucrative position and it is possible that his wealth stirred envy among the less favored and that this provoked accusations of immorality against him. Or perhaps his behavior was simply too flagrant to be ignored, even by his tolerant countrymen. Or it may have been because an enslaved African youth was the victim, as with the two known executions. Whatever the cause, Harmen was arrested in 1647 and accused of committing sodomy with his African slave Tobias.
Imprisoned in Fort Orange, he and Tobias managed to escape and fled to his old friends the Mohawks. It is interesting to speculate as to why Harmen knew he could find refuge among the Mohawks. Of course, he had a history and probably many friendships among them. He knew something of their language. And they were not hostile to the Dutch, whose sole interest on the northern edge of their colony was in trade, not in Indian lands.
But perhaps he chose that refuge because the native people at that point did not share the homophobia of the Europeans. Their traditions, until influenced negatively by missionaries or simply by European example, fostered not just tolerance (or looking the other way, which I suspect was the practice in the Dutch colony) but allowed a special place within their culture for gay people, who were known as “Two Spirits;” two-spirit males were extolled for their skill in women’s work and two-spirit females for their prowess in hunting and other typically masculine pursuits.
However, Harmen and Tobias did not have time to become part of this lifestyle, even if that had been their inclination. A Dutch posse set out in pursuit and found their quarry at Andagoron, a Mohawk village on the slopes of the Big Nose Mountain, a few miles west of Ossernenon, now the location of the Jesuit shrine dedicated to Isaac Jogues and his companions. A battle ensued and some Mohawk storehouses were burned before Harmen and Tobias were taken into custody. The extent of the resistance to the posse must have been considerable, suggesting that some of the Mohawks aided their old friend in the battle. (A few months later, the Mohawks, growing wise in the ways of the whites, sued the colonial government for damages, and collected.)
Taken back to Rensselaerwyck, Harmen was again imprisoned in the fort and once again he managed to escape. (That jailhouse must have been pretty flimsy. Or perhaps Harmen had sympathizers at the fort.) This time, however, he was not so lucky. While fleeing across the icy surface of the Hudson near the present I-90 bridge, he fell through the ice and was drowned.
I have been fascinated by Harmen van den Bogaert ever since discovering a brief mention of him in Russell Shorto’s Island at the Center of the World and thought for a long time about how I could tell his story as part of my fictional series on misunderstood figures from our early upstate history. The evidence as to the nature of his relationship with Tobias is contradictory. On the one hand, the young man was a slave and the power relationship suggests that he may have been coerced into sex by Harmen. This would also fit the pattern of the very limited number of prosecutions for sodomy in the colony. On the other hand, Tobias fled prison with Harmen and was with him at Andagoron when they were captured. (His later fate is unknown.)
Van den Bogaert’s vibrant personality, as reflected in his journal and by his wide-ranging enterprises and adventures, made me want to find a way to view his life with the degree of sympathy that would be possible only in someone who did not automatically condemn his behavior. And this led me to the invention of a narrator for my novel, The River That Flows Both Ways, in the person of Matouac, a young Mohican boy living in the van den Bogaert household. I imagine this narrator as the survivor of a massacre of his clan and of captivity among the Mohawks. Alone in the world, he is not unhappy when Harmen purchases him from a Mohawk warrior and makes him, along with Tobias, an assistant in the businesses of surgery, barbering, and gun-running.
From this vantage point, Matouac is also able to observe and compare the equally incomprehensible personalities of the exuberant Harmen and the faith-driven ascetic, Isaac Jogues. The story which the young Mohican tells of the tragic fates of both these men is transcribed by another remarkable historical figure who appears in the novel: Johannes Megapolensis. This Calvinist clergyman was close to the Iroquois and later stood up against the fierce Pieter Stuyvesant on behalf of Quakers and other dissenters.
And so, if you happen to be speeding along the Interstate from Boston to points west and cross the I-90 bridge over the Hudson, think about Harmen van den Bogaert, who drowned in the waters below. And if you continue west on the Thruway toward Buffalo, try to imagine in what is now rolling farmland the walled Mohawk villages where a violent, yet loving and often tolerant, people once flourished.
Cross published with more detail and illustrations at Upstate Earth