By Deborah Hamer

There is a curious passage in the correspondence of the directors of the Dutch West India Company and Peter Stuyvesant. Commenting in May 1658 on one Magdalena Dircx, who had been banished from New Amsterdam on Stuyvesant’s orders for her “dissolute life,” the directors wrote she would “not again receive our permission to return to New Netherland.” If she returned through “deceitful practices or under a false name,” the directors authorized Stuyvesant to punish her with a yet harsher sentence than banishment.[1] A few weeks later, however, the directors reversed what had seemed to be an informed, irrevocable decision. They allowed the supposedly odious Dircx and her husband, Harman Hendricksen, passage back to the colony after they promised to “lead there a quiet and honest life.”[2]

In some ways, this account seems to conform to a pattern that runs through Stuyvesant’s interactions with his superiors in Amsterdam. He adopted strict, intolerant positions that tended to make the colony unwelcoming to many, while the directors urged moderation if only for the purpose of growing the colony’s population. With the directors watching in horror as New Englanders and Marylanders encroached on “Dutch” territory, Stuyvesant, the son of a Calvinist minister, made life in New Netherland difficult for Jews and Lutherans and outright banished some English Quakers, negating hard won population advances.

Cort, Bondigh ende Waerachtigh Verhael van't schandelijk over-geven ende verlaten Vande voorname Conquesten van Brasil, 1655 from the John Carter Brown Library

The banishment of Magdalena Dircx was, however, more than a fight between the religious Stuyvesant and his more practical superiors in the Netherlands. Instead, it was a contest over whose honor and reputation — Stuyvesant’s or the West India Company’s — would be prioritized and whose sacrificed in the colonization of New Netherland. As Stuyvesant wrote out his banishment order in New Amsterdam, he might have looked over his shoulder, metaphorically of course, and seen the specters of all the disgraced colonial governors who preceded him in New Netherland and the larger Dutch Atlantic world. Their actions — and inactions — were dissected and debated in the contentious pamphlet literature of the Dutch Republic. Perhaps he had read, for example, a 1655 title that excoriated Wouter van Schonenburgh and Hendrick Haecx, his counterparts in the Dutch colony of Brazil, for their conduct in the colony’s 1654 surrender. Schoenburgh was old and listless; Haecx was grasping and greedy. Neither had done their duty, or so the pamphlet claimed.[3]

Claes Jansz. Visscher, West-Indisch Huis te Amsterdam, 1623-1626, Rijksmuseum

At the same time, the West India Company faced its own negative press, including a recent remonstrance by New Netherland colonist Adriaen van der Donck, who charged the West India Company with prioritizing its own profits over the common good.[4] Questions also lingered about whether the Company had done enough to save Brazil and whether, perhaps, the Luso-Brazilians had been justified in revolting. Had the directors installed an incompetent, greedy regime in Brazil that resorted to violence to earn money off the backs of abused Luso-Brazilian sugar planters? So asked some pamphleteers as the Dutch period in Brazil drew to a close.

But what had poor Magdalena Dircx to do with a vast, if faltering, colonial empire? And what had she done to earn her banishment in the first place? Even that relatively straightforward question is ultimately difficult to answer. Magdalena was banished together with another woman named Geertie Jacobs who has left a more extensive documentary trail in New Amsterdam. By 1658, Geertie had already had several run-ins with the law. In 1653, her husband brought a suit in New Amsterdam’s court that complained that Geertie had been slandered as a “whore.”[5] The following year Stuyvesant and his council warned her that she needed to repair her “dissolute” life because it brought “shame and disgrace to our nation.” The city’s sheriff was going to keep his eyes on her and the company she kept to ensure that she steered clear of “whores and whoremasters.”[6] But the turbulence in Geertie’s life continued. She was in court again in 1656 and 1657 to defend herself against two accusations that she had slandered honorable women by spreading rumors of improper sexual conduct.[7]

Magdalena herself was born in New Amsterdam, an early child of the colony. In 1657, she was about to marry her second husband, Harman Hendrickszen, a former soldier for the West India Company. She had a young daughter from her first marriage, which was solemnized in 1652, and Magdalena’s appearances in the historical record in this period pertain mostly to the division of her deceased husband’s estate between herself and her daughter. In March 1657, however, she and her new husband were summoned to appear before the city’s court and ultimately fined for insulting the firewardens of the city and making a “street riot.” Magdalena had apparently walked by the firewarden’s home and said, “there is a chimney sweep in the door; his chimney is well swept.”[8]

With the passage of nearly four centuries, it is difficult to understand whether she was attempting a joke or intending an insult, and it is still less clear what was so offensive about her remark. Perhaps she meant to question the firewarden’s reputation, implying that his unfettered access to homes to check chimneys allowed him access to private spaces that — to Magdalena — seemed ripe for either mutually satisfying, but illicit, flirtations or unwanted sexual harassment. Perhaps she meant that he was quick to look after the fire danger posed by and to his own home and slow to look to the homes of others whom he was likewise meant to protect.

Geertuydt Roghman, Schoonmakende vrouw, 1648-1652, from the Rijksmuseum [Woman Cleaning], Rijksmuseum

In any case, if the records leading up to their banishment are taken to tell the whole story, Magdalena and Geertie both seem to have been guilty of crimes of speech.[9] Geertie by questioning the sexual honor of her betters in New Amsterdam and Magdalena by denigrating a municipal official. Geertie’s case is particularly instructive. Even when she was guilty of acts — adultery — she was allowed to remain in New Netherland, but once she came to violate the conventions surrounding modesty and propriety in speech, she was banished. A great deal of popular literature in the seventeenth century Dutch Republic focused on how women ought to behave, and it constructed the ideal woman as one who worked quietly in the home, cooking, cleaning, and spinning.[10] While such ideals were far from the reality for many Dutch women, who could be found buying and selling in markets, gossiping and arguing on the street, and drinking and serving in taphouses, they, nevertheless, represented an aspiration. Modesty in speech was, apparently, something that Stuyvesant seemed intent on making a reality in New Amsterdam.

In a 1651 letter, the West India Company’s directors explained to Stuyvesant that all of their efforts at sending over people, soldiers, ammunitions, and goods should satisfy him about their interest in New Netherland and “your own reputation.”[11] By accepting the position of director general and taking up residence in New Amsterdam, Stuyvesant tied his reputation to the larger task of creating a flourishing colony in North America. Both he and the directors understood that. When Stuyvesant look at Magdalena Dircx, he saw a woman whose presence in his city raised questions about whether he was a competent governor, questions that might be aired before the world in print should the colony meet the same fate as Brazil.

But when the directors of the West India Company faced Magdalena Dircx, showing contrition and promising amendment, they saw something else. Relatively young and with a daughter who proved her fertility in tow, they might have seen future generations of Dutch colonists cultivating the land or engaged in profitable trades. Here was a woman who had a web of connections in New Amsterdam to support her, who was clamoring for the chance to return a colony that needed people. A family who the directors might hold up to their critics and to show that they had, in fact, pursued every avenue to get colonists to North America.

What happened when Magdalena and Harmen landed in New Amsterdam is anybody’s guess. But they lived out the remainder of their lives not in the city but in the town of Kingston, New York. Perhaps the ever-resourceful Stuyvesant realized that while he could not banish them from the colony, he could prevent them from settling in New Amsterdam. Ultimately, Stuyvesant and the directors both won — and both lost. When the colony fell to the English, Stuyvesant did face a reckoning in the Dutch Republic about his conduct in the defense of the colony, but no excoriation in pamphlets. Indeed, his reputation for competent, if somewhat harsh, rule remains strong nearly four hundred years later. The directors of the West India Company got their generation of Dutch colonists in New Netherland. Magdalena and Harmen baptized several children in Kingston, but as the colony passed from Dutch to English hands, their activities would enrich English, not Dutch, coffers. Although Magdalena Dircx was only one colonist among many, the scrutiny to which she was subjected shows how the demands of empire placed extraordinary pressure specifically on ordinary women.

Deborah Hamer is a research associate at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and an editor for Gotham.

[1] Charles Gehring, Correspondence, 1654-1658, New Netherland Documents Series vol. XII, (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2003), 175.

[2] Gehring, Correspondence, 1654-1658, 186.

[3] Cort, Bondigh ende Waerachtigh Verhael van’t schandelijck over-geven ende verlaten vande voorname conquesten van Brasil onder de regeeringe vande Heeren Wouter van Schonenburgh, President, Hendrick Haecx, Hoogen Raet, ende Sigismondus van Schoppe, Luytenant Generael over de Miilitie, 1654 (Tot Middelburgh, Gedruckt by Thomas Dircksz van Brouwers-haven), anno 1655.

[4] Adriaen van der Donck, Remonstrance, in E.B. O’Callaghan, ed., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York; Procured in Holland, England and France by John Romeyn Brodhead, 15 vols., (Albany, NY: Weed, Parsons, 1853-87), Vol. I: 271-318, 296.

[5] Berthold Fernow, ed., The Records of New Amsterdam, 1653-1674 (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., Inc.), 1976, vol. 1, pp. 96.

[6] Charles Gehring, ed., Council Minutes 1652-1654 (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co, Inc.), 1983, pp. 137.

[7] Fernow, ed., The Records of New Amsterdam, vol. 1, 298 for the adultery accusation, Fernow, ed., The Records of New Amsterdam, vol. 2, 184 for her slander accusation regarding the adultery of Cornelis Steenwyck and Mrs. Beeckman. She also had to ask for forgiveness from Engeltie Mans and pay a fine of 10 guilders for saying that Engeltie had been caught in sexual contact with Francis Rombout, Fernow, ed., The Records of New Amsterdam, vol. 2, 277.

[8] Fernow, ed., The Records of New Amsterdam, vol. 7, 146

[9] An introduction to the subject of women and speech can be found in Jane Kamensky, Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997)

[10] For an analysis of images of proper and improper Dutch women, see Wayne E. Franits, Paragons of Virtue: Women and Domesticity in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)

[11] Charles Gehring, ed., Correspondence 1647-1653, (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 112.

Magdalena Dircx’s New Amsterdam: Speech, Sex, and the Foundations of a City