0 comment Saturday, November 1, 2014 | admin
On this day in 1945, Indonesian nationalists declared their independence from the Netherlands. What's this got to do with America or Americans? Not a great deal, on the face of it, but it does touch on a few issues we discuss here.
I've written before that the Dutch who had resided in Indonesia or the 'Dutch East Indies' as was, were repatriated back to the Netherlands after the revolution establishing Indonesia's independence. I learned about this in college, but I find that very scant information on it is to be found on the Internet or elsewhere. Here's one brief paragraph about it:
'To withdraw all the troops and all the colonial Dutch families after independence became a big headache for the Dutch government. Many of the Dutch colonial people had never seen the mainland. Some of them had lived in Indonesia from generation to generation and hated the cold climate in Holland. Many were given a chance to emigrate to the U.S.A. or Australia. Many of them took that opportunity and started a new life in those countries. There were many Dutch Indonesians who immigrated to California. Still many of them stayed in Holland and mingled in with the Dutch society.''
So these people, of Dutch and sometimes mixed ancestry, who had never laid eyes on the Netherlands in many cases, were shipped 'back' to a country they had never seen. Why are cases like this never mentioned when somebody is wringing their hands over how we 'can't' repatriate aliens or in plain language, send them home? Our European kin were forced out, in some cases, of areas they had colonized centuries before. Yet in a sense they were going home, to the home of their ancestors and their natural kin. Still, they and their children, and perhaps several generations before them, had never known any other home than the colony in which they were born and lived. Do you reckon many native Indonesians fretted over how cruel and unfair it was to 'deport' people who were born in their islands? Somehow I doubt there was little public agonizing over it. Yet some Westerners tend to go into hysterics over the idea of sending anybody home, though in most cases the people in question have only recently transplanted themselves to American soil, unlike the Dutch and the mixed-race 'Indos' who were shipped to the Netherlands circa 1950.
I suppose by that time, they were ready to leave, as the revolution was no picnic for them:
'It was common for ethnic 'out-groups' - Dutch internees, Eurasian, Ambonese and Chinese - and anyone considered to be a spy, to be subjected to intimidation, kidnap, robbery, and sometimes murder, even organised massacres. Such attacks would continue to some extent for the course of the Revolution.
[...]
In September and October 1945 the ugly side of revolution surfaced with a series of incidents involving pro-Dutch Eurasians, and atrocities committed by Indonesian mobs against European internees. Ferocious fighting erupted when 6,000 British Indian troops landed in the city. Sukarno and Hatta negotiated a ceasefire between the Republicans and the British forces led by Brigadier Mallaby. Following the killing of Mallaby on 30 October, the British sent more troops into the city from 10 November under the cover of air attacks. Although the European forces largely captured the city in three days, the poorly armed Republicans fought on for three weeks and thousands died as the population fled to the countryside.
[...]
A total of 1,200 British soldiers were killed or went missing in Java and Sumatra in 1945 and 1946, most of them Indian soldiers. More than 5000 Dutch soldiers lost their lives in Indonesia between 1945 and 1949. Many more Japanese died; in Bandung alone, 1,057 died, only half of whom died in actual combat, the rest killed in rampages by Indonesians.
Tens of thousands of Chinese and Eurasians were killed or left homeless, despite the fact that many Chinese supported the Revolution. 7 million people were displaced on Java and Sumatra.''
There were apparently quite a few 'Indos' or mixed people in Indonesia, though I haven't seen an exact number. It appears that 60,000 'Indos' were repatriated to the Netherlands, even though their roots were partly in Indonesia. It seems they were associated with the colonial Dutch even if (as their photos indicate) many had little Dutch blood, having intermarried amongst each other for generations.
Apparently the Dutch colonists, especially the earlier generations, were very prone to intermarriage or to taking Asian concubines. At first this was because few Dutch women came as colonials, but even after more Dutch women came, the rate of intermarriage was about 30 percent.
This kind of thing invariably complicates such situations; the presence of mixed race people makes any such conflict more tangled. The Dutch, according the sources I found, encouraged mixing, thinking that it would solidify or help legitimize their rule, if they had blood ties to the Indonesians. The British had an opposite tendency, and discouraged mixing in most of their colonies.
But in our situation, as more and more people intermarry or have children with Hispanics or others among us, it will be harder and harder as conflicts increase and people naturally pick sides. Where does the mixed person stand? Where will their loyalties be? And what about those who marry out? Their allegiances are compromised and in many cases they are lost to us, as are the children of such unions.
But as we've seen, intermarriage and mixed children do not avert conflict and division, though our overlords seem to think this will be the case.
The situation of a colonial power having to leave the colony as native peoples press for independence is not exactly like ours. Still this episode in history might make us think a little about why the United Nations supports the right of 'indigenous' peoples to independence, (as they did in Indonesia's case), seeing colonialism as a great injustice -- whereas now the U.N. aggressively promotes the 'right of emigration', the right of people to live wherever they choose with no regard for the right of the existing population of that country.
And the issues of repatriation, of simply sending people home, is one that has become radioactive in our day, whereas nobody thought it amiss back in 1950 or so. We live in an age of cognitive dissonance as ideas that are declared anathema in one situation are considered good and appropriate in other cases. I suppose, again, it's all about the 'victim' groups versus the 'villain' groups, and the left is writing the script, as always.
I've written before that the Dutch who had resided in Indonesia or the 'Dutch East Indies' as was, were repatriated back to the Netherlands after the revolution establishing Indonesia's independence. I learned about this in college, but I find that very scant information on it is to be found on the Internet or elsewhere. Here's one brief paragraph about it:
'To withdraw all the troops and all the colonial Dutch families after independence became a big headache for the Dutch government. Many of the Dutch colonial people had never seen the mainland. Some of them had lived in Indonesia from generation to generation and hated the cold climate in Holland. Many were given a chance to emigrate to the U.S.A. or Australia. Many of them took that opportunity and started a new life in those countries. There were many Dutch Indonesians who immigrated to California. Still many of them stayed in Holland and mingled in with the Dutch society.''
So these people, of Dutch and sometimes mixed ancestry, who had never laid eyes on the Netherlands in many cases, were shipped 'back' to a country they had never seen. Why are cases like this never mentioned when somebody is wringing their hands over how we 'can't' repatriate aliens or in plain language, send them home? Our European kin were forced out, in some cases, of areas they had colonized centuries before. Yet in a sense they were going home, to the home of their ancestors and their natural kin. Still, they and their children, and perhaps several generations before them, had never known any other home than the colony in which they were born and lived. Do you reckon many native Indonesians fretted over how cruel and unfair it was to 'deport' people who were born in their islands? Somehow I doubt there was little public agonizing over it. Yet some Westerners tend to go into hysterics over the idea of sending anybody home, though in most cases the people in question have only recently transplanted themselves to American soil, unlike the Dutch and the mixed-race 'Indos' who were shipped to the Netherlands circa 1950.
I suppose by that time, they were ready to leave, as the revolution was no picnic for them:
'It was common for ethnic 'out-groups' - Dutch internees, Eurasian, Ambonese and Chinese - and anyone considered to be a spy, to be subjected to intimidation, kidnap, robbery, and sometimes murder, even organised massacres. Such attacks would continue to some extent for the course of the Revolution.
[...]
In September and October 1945 the ugly side of revolution surfaced with a series of incidents involving pro-Dutch Eurasians, and atrocities committed by Indonesian mobs against European internees. Ferocious fighting erupted when 6,000 British Indian troops landed in the city. Sukarno and Hatta negotiated a ceasefire between the Republicans and the British forces led by Brigadier Mallaby. Following the killing of Mallaby on 30 October, the British sent more troops into the city from 10 November under the cover of air attacks. Although the European forces largely captured the city in three days, the poorly armed Republicans fought on for three weeks and thousands died as the population fled to the countryside.
[...]
A total of 1,200 British soldiers were killed or went missing in Java and Sumatra in 1945 and 1946, most of them Indian soldiers. More than 5000 Dutch soldiers lost their lives in Indonesia between 1945 and 1949. Many more Japanese died; in Bandung alone, 1,057 died, only half of whom died in actual combat, the rest killed in rampages by Indonesians.
Tens of thousands of Chinese and Eurasians were killed or left homeless, despite the fact that many Chinese supported the Revolution. 7 million people were displaced on Java and Sumatra.''
There were apparently quite a few 'Indos' or mixed people in Indonesia, though I haven't seen an exact number. It appears that 60,000 'Indos' were repatriated to the Netherlands, even though their roots were partly in Indonesia. It seems they were associated with the colonial Dutch even if (as their photos indicate) many had little Dutch blood, having intermarried amongst each other for generations.
Apparently the Dutch colonists, especially the earlier generations, were very prone to intermarriage or to taking Asian concubines. At first this was because few Dutch women came as colonials, but even after more Dutch women came, the rate of intermarriage was about 30 percent.
This kind of thing invariably complicates such situations; the presence of mixed race people makes any such conflict more tangled. The Dutch, according the sources I found, encouraged mixing, thinking that it would solidify or help legitimize their rule, if they had blood ties to the Indonesians. The British had an opposite tendency, and discouraged mixing in most of their colonies.
But in our situation, as more and more people intermarry or have children with Hispanics or others among us, it will be harder and harder as conflicts increase and people naturally pick sides. Where does the mixed person stand? Where will their loyalties be? And what about those who marry out? Their allegiances are compromised and in many cases they are lost to us, as are the children of such unions.
But as we've seen, intermarriage and mixed children do not avert conflict and division, though our overlords seem to think this will be the case.
The situation of a colonial power having to leave the colony as native peoples press for independence is not exactly like ours. Still this episode in history might make us think a little about why the United Nations supports the right of 'indigenous' peoples to independence, (as they did in Indonesia's case), seeing colonialism as a great injustice -- whereas now the U.N. aggressively promotes the 'right of emigration', the right of people to live wherever they choose with no regard for the right of the existing population of that country.
And the issues of repatriation, of simply sending people home, is one that has become radioactive in our day, whereas nobody thought it amiss back in 1950 or so. We live in an age of cognitive dissonance as ideas that are declared anathema in one situation are considered good and appropriate in other cases. I suppose, again, it's all about the 'victim' groups versus the 'villain' groups, and the left is writing the script, as always.
Labels: Colonialism, Colonies, Diversity, Ethnic Conflicts, Ethnic Division, History, Multiculturalism, Multiracialism
0 comment Friday, October 3, 2014 | admin
Today, August 18, is the birthday of Virginia Dare, who was born in the Roanoke Colony, Virginia, in 1587.
To my great surprise, there is no mention of this today on her namesake website, VDare.com, although the archived articles are no doubt still there.
So, despite having no new VDare piece to which I can link, I will write about Virginia Dare and the 'Lost Colony' as I usually do on this day.
I suspect my regular readers are thoroughly familiar with the story of the Roanoke Colony, or the 'Lost Colony', and the story of little Virginia Dare, but in case there are some readers to whom this story is unfamiliar, I will say that Virginia Dare was the first English child born on this continent.
Virginia Dare's parents, Eleanor and Ananias Dare, were part of the second group of Roanoke colonists, most of the first group having abandoned the colony to return with Sir Francis Drake to England the year before the later colonists came. The colony governor, John White, was the father of Eleanor Dare.
White, who was something of an artist, had sketched the flora and fauna, as well as the Indians of Virginia.
I will quote here from the book 'Wild Shores: America's Beginnings' by Tee Loftin Snell:
On August 18, 1587, White's daughter Eleanor, wife of Ananias Dare, gave birth to a girl, named Virginia, "because," White wrote, "this childe was the first Christian borne in Virginia." A few days later, the colonists pressured the grandfather to return with the ships to England and personally bear to Sir Walter the news that Roanoke's people must have a supply ship immediately.
John White never saw Eleanor or his granddaughter again. As I gently handled his exquisite watercolors at the British Museum in London, I shuddered at the thought of the agonizing three years he spent trying to return to Roanoke.
No ships went there, for Queen Elizabeth, to save her country from vengeful Catholic Philip of Spain, had called all English vessels to her service.
[...]
"While the Armada crisis absorbed England's attention, Roanoke's settlers struggled with a life-or-death crisis too," Mrs. Fred Morrison remarked when I visited Roanoke Island, North Carolina. As we walked from the waterfront amphitheater past grassy ramparts outlining the original fort, Mrs. Morrison, producer of Roanoke's summertime musical drama, speculated about the settlers' fate. "Paul Green's play the Lost Colony suggests that the colonists -- Sampson, Butler, Gramme, Dare, we know the names of all the 'lost' people -- soon realized no ship would come in time to save them," Mrs. Morrison said. "So they left Roanoke."
"Possibly they floated their goods and building materials 60 miles south to Manteo's village on present-day Hatteras Island. Certainly the one word they left behind indicates that's what happened."
The word was "Croatoan," pronounced CROY-tuh-WAN by Indians. John White found it in 1590 having arranged for his own passage to America.
Arriving at Roanoke Island after dark on August 17, he and the sailors with him ''espied...ye light of a great fire thorow the woods...When we came right over against it, we...sounded a trumpet a Call, & afterwardes many familiar English tunes of Songs, and called to them friendly, but we had no answere..."
Next morning White and his companions found the fire as "sundry rotten trees burning." Nothing remained of the colony. The houses had been "taken downe" and moved away. On a gate post of "a high palisado of great trees...in fayre Capitall letters was grauen CROATOAN, without any crosse or signe of distress..."
White's captain turned the ship toward Croatoan Island, where, ironically, he had anchored for the night just before reaching the inlet for Roanoke. Weather "fouler and fouler" blew the ship away from the shore. John White watched the disappearing outline of the Outer Banks and beseeched the Almighty "to helpe & comfort his daughter and grandchild whom he believed still lived.
Did they? No one has indisputable evidence.
But the Lumbee Indians in present Robeson County, North Carolina, "have a strong tradition that the Roanoke colonists amalgamated with them," as historian Samuel Eliot Morrison says in The European Discovery of America. Some blue-eyed, fair-haired types, Elizabethan words, and surnames all "bear this out," he adds. The Lumbees, he notes, earlier known as Croatoan or Hatteras Indians, migrated inland about 1650. About 1660, the Reverend Morgan Jones wandered into their midst and to his surprise "conversed in English" with them.
But did all the Hatteras clans go inland? About 1700 John Lawson, exploring North Carolina's coast, wrote that ''gray-eyed'' Hatteras Indians said "several of their ancestors were White people, and could talk in a Book..."
And I heard these intriguing remarks from Sheriff Frank Calhoun, 67, at Manteo on Roanoke Island: "My grandfather, born in 1830, told me that in his Indian village he lived in one of several very old two-story houses of hand-hewn timbers and boards on the mainland across from Roanoke. His blond, blue-eyed mother, Malockie Paine, we believe, was descended from colonist Henry Paine."
As we read the recent news that White Americans will be a minority within a few decades (probably sooner), I have to wonder, as I have wondered in the past: a few hundred years hence, will there be any blond, blue-eyed people on this continent whose ancestry will be a subject of speculation? Or will we of today be tomorrow's 'Lost Colony'?
What happens in the next decade -- or less -- will likely decide our fate.
Update: I see that there is now a James Fulford piece on VDare.com, aptly called 'Virginia Dare -- White Minority!'.
To my great surprise, there is no mention of this today on her namesake website, VDare.com, although the archived articles are no doubt still there.
So, despite having no new VDare piece to which I can link, I will write about Virginia Dare and the 'Lost Colony' as I usually do on this day.
I suspect my regular readers are thoroughly familiar with the story of the Roanoke Colony, or the 'Lost Colony', and the story of little Virginia Dare, but in case there are some readers to whom this story is unfamiliar, I will say that Virginia Dare was the first English child born on this continent.
Virginia Dare's parents, Eleanor and Ananias Dare, were part of the second group of Roanoke colonists, most of the first group having abandoned the colony to return with Sir Francis Drake to England the year before the later colonists came. The colony governor, John White, was the father of Eleanor Dare.
White, who was something of an artist, had sketched the flora and fauna, as well as the Indians of Virginia.
I will quote here from the book 'Wild Shores: America's Beginnings' by Tee Loftin Snell:
On August 18, 1587, White's daughter Eleanor, wife of Ananias Dare, gave birth to a girl, named Virginia, "because," White wrote, "this childe was the first Christian borne in Virginia." A few days later, the colonists pressured the grandfather to return with the ships to England and personally bear to Sir Walter the news that Roanoke's people must have a supply ship immediately.
John White never saw Eleanor or his granddaughter again. As I gently handled his exquisite watercolors at the British Museum in London, I shuddered at the thought of the agonizing three years he spent trying to return to Roanoke.
No ships went there, for Queen Elizabeth, to save her country from vengeful Catholic Philip of Spain, had called all English vessels to her service.
[...]
"While the Armada crisis absorbed England's attention, Roanoke's settlers struggled with a life-or-death crisis too," Mrs. Fred Morrison remarked when I visited Roanoke Island, North Carolina. As we walked from the waterfront amphitheater past grassy ramparts outlining the original fort, Mrs. Morrison, producer of Roanoke's summertime musical drama, speculated about the settlers' fate. "Paul Green's play the Lost Colony suggests that the colonists -- Sampson, Butler, Gramme, Dare, we know the names of all the 'lost' people -- soon realized no ship would come in time to save them," Mrs. Morrison said. "So they left Roanoke."
"Possibly they floated their goods and building materials 60 miles south to Manteo's village on present-day Hatteras Island. Certainly the one word they left behind indicates that's what happened."
The word was "Croatoan," pronounced CROY-tuh-WAN by Indians. John White found it in 1590 having arranged for his own passage to America.
Arriving at Roanoke Island after dark on August 17, he and the sailors with him ''espied...ye light of a great fire thorow the woods...When we came right over against it, we...sounded a trumpet a Call, & afterwardes many familiar English tunes of Songs, and called to them friendly, but we had no answere..."
Next morning White and his companions found the fire as "sundry rotten trees burning." Nothing remained of the colony. The houses had been "taken downe" and moved away. On a gate post of "a high palisado of great trees...in fayre Capitall letters was grauen CROATOAN, without any crosse or signe of distress..."
White's captain turned the ship toward Croatoan Island, where, ironically, he had anchored for the night just before reaching the inlet for Roanoke. Weather "fouler and fouler" blew the ship away from the shore. John White watched the disappearing outline of the Outer Banks and beseeched the Almighty "to helpe & comfort his daughter and grandchild whom he believed still lived.
Did they? No one has indisputable evidence.
But the Lumbee Indians in present Robeson County, North Carolina, "have a strong tradition that the Roanoke colonists amalgamated with them," as historian Samuel Eliot Morrison says in The European Discovery of America. Some blue-eyed, fair-haired types, Elizabethan words, and surnames all "bear this out," he adds. The Lumbees, he notes, earlier known as Croatoan or Hatteras Indians, migrated inland about 1650. About 1660, the Reverend Morgan Jones wandered into their midst and to his surprise "conversed in English" with them.
But did all the Hatteras clans go inland? About 1700 John Lawson, exploring North Carolina's coast, wrote that ''gray-eyed'' Hatteras Indians said "several of their ancestors were White people, and could talk in a Book..."
And I heard these intriguing remarks from Sheriff Frank Calhoun, 67, at Manteo on Roanoke Island: "My grandfather, born in 1830, told me that in his Indian village he lived in one of several very old two-story houses of hand-hewn timbers and boards on the mainland across from Roanoke. His blond, blue-eyed mother, Malockie Paine, we believe, was descended from colonist Henry Paine."
As we read the recent news that White Americans will be a minority within a few decades (probably sooner), I have to wonder, as I have wondered in the past: a few hundred years hence, will there be any blond, blue-eyed people on this continent whose ancestry will be a subject of speculation? Or will we of today be tomorrow's 'Lost Colony'?
What happens in the next decade -- or less -- will likely decide our fate.
Update: I see that there is now a James Fulford piece on VDare.com, aptly called 'Virginia Dare -- White Minority!'.
Labels: American Heritage, American History, Colonies, Lost Colony
0 comment Friday, July 18, 2014 | admin
As I mentioned in my last blog entry, I came across an old article in a book, reprinted from a turn-of-the-20th century Harper's Magazine, called The Dutch Influence in New England.
I found the article eye-opening, in that quite honestly I had not been aware of the considerable influence exerted by the Dutch on our early New England colonies. Of course I was aware that the Pilgrims who founded the Plymouth Colony had sojourned in Holland before coming here on the Mayflower. But the Dutch influence seems to have been substantial in many areas of life.
I will only excerpt the article; it's too lengthy for a blog entry, and those who are interested might seek out the book, titled New England, originally published in 1990 by Octopus Books, Ltd. in London.
The writer of the article (who is not credited by name) begins by describing the English Separatists who took refuge in the Netherlands, in the city of Leyden. They were mostly tradesmen and craftsmen, having little in common with the more prosperous English residents of Leyden at that time:
''The Separatists were therefore thrown all the more closely with their Dutch fellow Calvinists of like social rank. Not only were their leaders facile in speaking and reading the Dutch vernacular, but probably one-half of the Plymouth settlers were born in Leyden, and picked up Dutch just as the offspring of aliens among us imbibe American English.''
In a letter from Plymouth years later, Governor Bradford wrote to the Dutch at New Amsterdam:
" 'Now, forasmuch as this [alliance between England and Holland against Spain, their common foe] is sufficient to unite us together in love and good neighbourhood in all our dealings; yet are many of us tied by the good and courteous entreaty which we have found in your country, having lived there many years with freedom and good content, as many of our friends do to this day; for which we are bound to be thankful, and our children after us, and shall never forget the same, but heartily desire your good and prosperity as our own forever.'
Still again, Bradford wrote from Plymouth, October 1, 1627. 'Acknowledging ourselves tied in a strict obligation unto your country and state for the good entertainment and free liberty which we had, and our brethren and countrymen yet there have and do enjoy, under your most honorable Lords and States.'
[...]
Nowhere on the map of the United States does one find the names of Scrooby, Bawtry, or Austerfield, but at Plymouth the oldest thoroughfare is appropriately named Leyden Street.
Here...were many proofs that the first settlers of New England had come directly, not from Great Britain, but from Holland. Some of the tangible evidences were Dutch seeds, books, provisions -- food for body and mind -- Dutch ovens, cradles, furniture, tools, and hardware of all sorts, especially of the Delft sort (such as saved the Mayflower from going to pieces during a storm at sea as Bradford tells) military gear and equipment, clothing, books printed on Dutch presses, spinning-wheels, and kitchen implements.
These were things seen and temporal, capable of preservation in a museum. In addition there were realities not tangible, but as traceable as water-marks in paper. Distinctively Dutch influences in the primal basic life of New England are clear to the unprejudiced student."
The writer focuses on Dutch influence in the daily life, in the social and political sphere as well as in the practical arts.
Wherever the Dutch farmers in America who refused to live under the semi-feudal patroons made their settlements they discarded the artificial and un-Netherlandish system of patroons and manors, and followed the ancestral and familial methods of commonage in land, representation in government, and democratic ideas and instincts in freedom inherited for ages."
The article refers to a book by Ubbo Emmius, "History of Friesland', about that ''ultra-democratic'' Dutch province.
Page after page of this book, with its account of the elections after prayer, and of written ballots, of magistrates and select-men. reads like descriptions of early New England town meetings."
The Massachusetts Pilgrims and Puritans, as well as Connecticut settlers whose leaders had lived in Holland, laid out their lands Frisian-style and "...they also built their houses with stockades, gates, 'a trench six foote long and two foote broad', with common forest, pasture, and arable land, with common fence, common herd or swine, daily assembled and led out at sound of horn, tended by day and led back by night."
The article describes in some detail how the Dutch excelled, surpassing most European peoples, in inventiveness in horticulture and agriculture. They were the first to introduce the 'Oriental fruits and flowers, grains and plants that are now commonplace'. They invented the ''forcing-bed, hot-house, winnowing fan, the plough in modern form.'' They introduced most garden vegetables into New England and the Atlantic colonies. They taught rotation of crops. They also, as most of us know, excelled in land reclamation, building superior dikes and drainage. They used the best farming tools, and their methods slowly spread among the English settlers. The Dutch also adapted more quickly to the cold climate of the Northeastern colonies; their sleighs enabled them to travel more easily during the long winters.
The Dutch, like the Puritans, were Calvinists, and Calvinism always breeds cleanliness and democracy, as surely as it never breeds poverty or arbitrary government."
In personal habits, the Dutch were known for their cleanliness, and their generous use of soap and starch, both of which they made very cheaply. They invented the use of starch for clothing.
Many of the domestic accoutrements and customs came from the Dutch:
In the evolution of post and frame, enclosed and canopied bed, bolster, and the modern pillow covered with removable case, and the bolster cased and not merely tucked under the sheet, the invention of the thimble, in the perfection and multiplication of spinning-wheels for the domestic treatment of yarn, and of home machinery for the preparation of flax into linen, and of the blending of the two into linsey-woolsey, the Dutch were the inventors, and the English, on either side of the Atlantic, the borrowers."
The English language in America was also influenced by the Dutch:
Whenever we utter the words anchor, caboose, ballast, school (of fish), sloop, stoker, stove, doily, brandy, duffel, cambric, easel, landscape, boss, stoop, 'forlorn hope', body-guard, scow, Santa Claus, blickey (tin), and a host of words in art, music, seamanship, handicraft, war, exploration, and the lines of human achievement most followed in the 17th century, we are but mispronouncing, more or less fluently, Dutch words. These words are the labels of things borrowed, from the little country which, after England, had most to do with the making of the American republic.
From the first fight and flight of the Indians before the prowess of Miles Standish to this day, the military spirit has never waned among the brave New Englanders. Yet, apart from the ancestral fighting spirit of these English colonists, it must not be forgotten that the school in which they were trained was the Dutch army, and the republican War of Independence in the Low Countries.
In the development of legal science, we have heard some of the brilliant lawyers of Massachusetts confess the great indebtedness of the law that rules us to Grotius and the great Dutch jurists whose names are more famous than familiar. The ancestral drops of 'Nederlandisch bloet' in Oliver Wendell Holmes, Washington Allston, and a host of the bluest-blooded New Englanders, whose names, as the records in the Netherlands show, were Dutch before they were English, hint at a force in letters and art still unspent.
[...]
Indeed, 'ye laudable customs of ye Low Countries' was followed...by confederacy of states, by revolutionary war, by declaration of independence, written constitution, and red, white, and blue flag.
[...]
In the evolution of that noble type of man and very agreeable person, the modern New Englander, there have been many potent influences. Not the least of the factors moulding him has been the influence of Dutch precedent, contact, and example.
[...]
Nevertheless, of the energies which have made and are making the typical composite American, those contributed by the Dutch were among the first and the most lasting. Arising at Holland's heroic age, they acted upon a people in their formative period. If Faith, Morality, Freedom, Law, and Education as symbolized in the granite statutes of the national monument in Plymouth, be the leading characteristics of New England civilization, then there is equal debt to their exemplars on both sides of the North Sea."
I found the article eye-opening, in that quite honestly I had not been aware of the considerable influence exerted by the Dutch on our early New England colonies. Of course I was aware that the Pilgrims who founded the Plymouth Colony had sojourned in Holland before coming here on the Mayflower. But the Dutch influence seems to have been substantial in many areas of life.
I will only excerpt the article; it's too lengthy for a blog entry, and those who are interested might seek out the book, titled New England, originally published in 1990 by Octopus Books, Ltd. in London.
The writer of the article (who is not credited by name) begins by describing the English Separatists who took refuge in the Netherlands, in the city of Leyden. They were mostly tradesmen and craftsmen, having little in common with the more prosperous English residents of Leyden at that time:
''The Separatists were therefore thrown all the more closely with their Dutch fellow Calvinists of like social rank. Not only were their leaders facile in speaking and reading the Dutch vernacular, but probably one-half of the Plymouth settlers were born in Leyden, and picked up Dutch just as the offspring of aliens among us imbibe American English.''
In a letter from Plymouth years later, Governor Bradford wrote to the Dutch at New Amsterdam:
" 'Now, forasmuch as this [alliance between England and Holland against Spain, their common foe] is sufficient to unite us together in love and good neighbourhood in all our dealings; yet are many of us tied by the good and courteous entreaty which we have found in your country, having lived there many years with freedom and good content, as many of our friends do to this day; for which we are bound to be thankful, and our children after us, and shall never forget the same, but heartily desire your good and prosperity as our own forever.'
Still again, Bradford wrote from Plymouth, October 1, 1627. 'Acknowledging ourselves tied in a strict obligation unto your country and state for the good entertainment and free liberty which we had, and our brethren and countrymen yet there have and do enjoy, under your most honorable Lords and States.'
[...]
Nowhere on the map of the United States does one find the names of Scrooby, Bawtry, or Austerfield, but at Plymouth the oldest thoroughfare is appropriately named Leyden Street.
Here...were many proofs that the first settlers of New England had come directly, not from Great Britain, but from Holland. Some of the tangible evidences were Dutch seeds, books, provisions -- food for body and mind -- Dutch ovens, cradles, furniture, tools, and hardware of all sorts, especially of the Delft sort (such as saved the Mayflower from going to pieces during a storm at sea as Bradford tells) military gear and equipment, clothing, books printed on Dutch presses, spinning-wheels, and kitchen implements.
These were things seen and temporal, capable of preservation in a museum. In addition there were realities not tangible, but as traceable as water-marks in paper. Distinctively Dutch influences in the primal basic life of New England are clear to the unprejudiced student."
The writer focuses on Dutch influence in the daily life, in the social and political sphere as well as in the practical arts.
Wherever the Dutch farmers in America who refused to live under the semi-feudal patroons made their settlements they discarded the artificial and un-Netherlandish system of patroons and manors, and followed the ancestral and familial methods of commonage in land, representation in government, and democratic ideas and instincts in freedom inherited for ages."
The article refers to a book by Ubbo Emmius, "History of Friesland', about that ''ultra-democratic'' Dutch province.
Page after page of this book, with its account of the elections after prayer, and of written ballots, of magistrates and select-men. reads like descriptions of early New England town meetings."
The Massachusetts Pilgrims and Puritans, as well as Connecticut settlers whose leaders had lived in Holland, laid out their lands Frisian-style and "...they also built their houses with stockades, gates, 'a trench six foote long and two foote broad', with common forest, pasture, and arable land, with common fence, common herd or swine, daily assembled and led out at sound of horn, tended by day and led back by night."
The article describes in some detail how the Dutch excelled, surpassing most European peoples, in inventiveness in horticulture and agriculture. They were the first to introduce the 'Oriental fruits and flowers, grains and plants that are now commonplace'. They invented the ''forcing-bed, hot-house, winnowing fan, the plough in modern form.'' They introduced most garden vegetables into New England and the Atlantic colonies. They taught rotation of crops. They also, as most of us know, excelled in land reclamation, building superior dikes and drainage. They used the best farming tools, and their methods slowly spread among the English settlers. The Dutch also adapted more quickly to the cold climate of the Northeastern colonies; their sleighs enabled them to travel more easily during the long winters.
The Dutch, like the Puritans, were Calvinists, and Calvinism always breeds cleanliness and democracy, as surely as it never breeds poverty or arbitrary government."
In personal habits, the Dutch were known for their cleanliness, and their generous use of soap and starch, both of which they made very cheaply. They invented the use of starch for clothing.
Many of the domestic accoutrements and customs came from the Dutch:
In the evolution of post and frame, enclosed and canopied bed, bolster, and the modern pillow covered with removable case, and the bolster cased and not merely tucked under the sheet, the invention of the thimble, in the perfection and multiplication of spinning-wheels for the domestic treatment of yarn, and of home machinery for the preparation of flax into linen, and of the blending of the two into linsey-woolsey, the Dutch were the inventors, and the English, on either side of the Atlantic, the borrowers."
The English language in America was also influenced by the Dutch:
Whenever we utter the words anchor, caboose, ballast, school (of fish), sloop, stoker, stove, doily, brandy, duffel, cambric, easel, landscape, boss, stoop, 'forlorn hope', body-guard, scow, Santa Claus, blickey (tin), and a host of words in art, music, seamanship, handicraft, war, exploration, and the lines of human achievement most followed in the 17th century, we are but mispronouncing, more or less fluently, Dutch words. These words are the labels of things borrowed, from the little country which, after England, had most to do with the making of the American republic.
From the first fight and flight of the Indians before the prowess of Miles Standish to this day, the military spirit has never waned among the brave New Englanders. Yet, apart from the ancestral fighting spirit of these English colonists, it must not be forgotten that the school in which they were trained was the Dutch army, and the republican War of Independence in the Low Countries.
In the development of legal science, we have heard some of the brilliant lawyers of Massachusetts confess the great indebtedness of the law that rules us to Grotius and the great Dutch jurists whose names are more famous than familiar. The ancestral drops of 'Nederlandisch bloet' in Oliver Wendell Holmes, Washington Allston, and a host of the bluest-blooded New Englanders, whose names, as the records in the Netherlands show, were Dutch before they were English, hint at a force in letters and art still unspent.
[...]
Indeed, 'ye laudable customs of ye Low Countries' was followed...by confederacy of states, by revolutionary war, by declaration of independence, written constitution, and red, white, and blue flag.
[...]
In the evolution of that noble type of man and very agreeable person, the modern New Englander, there have been many potent influences. Not the least of the factors moulding him has been the influence of Dutch precedent, contact, and example.
[...]
Nevertheless, of the energies which have made and are making the typical composite American, those contributed by the Dutch were among the first and the most lasting. Arising at Holland's heroic age, they acted upon a people in their formative period. If Faith, Morality, Freedom, Law, and Education as symbolized in the granite statutes of the national monument in Plymouth, be the leading characteristics of New England civilization, then there is equal debt to their exemplars on both sides of the North Sea."
Labels: American History, American Identity, Colonies, Dutch, Early America
0 comment Thursday, June 26, 2014 | admin
On December 21, 1620, the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth.
David Alan Black tells us about it here.
Labels: American History, Anglo-Saxon Heritage, Colonies
0 comment Monday, May 12, 2014 | admin
On a previous Thanksgiving, I posted a link to this article , A Hymn's Long Journey Home, which tells the story of the song ''We Gather Together to Ask the Lord's Blessing.'' Realizing some of you have read it before, I post it because it's an interesting little story which tells us something about the early history of our country, as illustrated by a hymn.
Those of you who are old enough to have gone to school in the 'old America,', before the name of God was banished from our schools, probably remember the hymn, or in fact sang it in school. I know I did.
We gather together to ask the Lord�s blessing;
He chastens and hastens His will to make known.
The wicked oppressing now cease from distressing.
Sing praises to His Name; He forgets not His own.
Beside us to guide us, our God with us joining,
Ordaining, maintaining His kingdom divine;
So from the beginning the fight we were winning;
Thou, Lord, were at our side, all glory be Thine!
We all do extol Thee, Thou Leader triumphant,
And pray that Thou still our Defender will be.
Let Thy congregation escape tribulation;
Thy Name be ever praised! O Lord, make us free!''
The linked article tells us about the Dutch origins of this hymn, and about how early Dutch colonists (among whom were some of my ancestors, and probably those of some of my readers as well) brought this hymn with them from Holland. Read about the history behind it at the link.
Although our country has an overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon character deriving from the early English colonists in New England and Virginia, it's appropriate to remember our all-but-forgotten Dutch roots and this hymn is one reminder of that.
And the words of the hymn seem to be appropriate to our present situation in troubled 21st century America.
Those of you who are old enough to have gone to school in the 'old America,', before the name of God was banished from our schools, probably remember the hymn, or in fact sang it in school. I know I did.
We gather together to ask the Lord�s blessing;
He chastens and hastens His will to make known.
The wicked oppressing now cease from distressing.
Sing praises to His Name; He forgets not His own.
Beside us to guide us, our God with us joining,
Ordaining, maintaining His kingdom divine;
So from the beginning the fight we were winning;
Thou, Lord, were at our side, all glory be Thine!
We all do extol Thee, Thou Leader triumphant,
And pray that Thou still our Defender will be.
Let Thy congregation escape tribulation;
Thy Name be ever praised! O Lord, make us free!''
The linked article tells us about the Dutch origins of this hymn, and about how early Dutch colonists (among whom were some of my ancestors, and probably those of some of my readers as well) brought this hymn with them from Holland. Read about the history behind it at the link.
Although our country has an overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon character deriving from the early English colonists in New England and Virginia, it's appropriate to remember our all-but-forgotten Dutch roots and this hymn is one reminder of that.
And the words of the hymn seem to be appropriate to our present situation in troubled 21st century America.
Labels: American Heritage, American History, Christianity, Colonies, Dutch