Death of a Notary: Conquest and Change in Colonial New York

by Donna Merwick

This outstanding contribution to Colonial social history is highly recommended for all undergraduate and graduate history collections.
― Choice "He was the only one. He was the only man to have committed suicide in the town's seventeenth-century history." So begins Donna Merwick's fascinating tale of a Dutch notary who ended his life in his adopted community of Albany. In a major feat of historical reconstruction, she introduces us to Adriaen Janse van Ilpendam and the long-forgotten world he inhabited in Holland's North American colony. Her powerful narrative will make readers care for this quiet and studious man, an "ordinary" settler for whom the clash of empires brought tragedy. Like so many of his fellow countrymen, Janse left his Dutch homeland as a young adult to try his luck in New Netherland. After spending a few years on Manhattan Island, he moved on to the fur trading settlement today known as Albany. Merwick traces his journey to a new continent and re-creates the satisfying existence this respected burgher enjoyed with his wife in the bustling town. As a notary Janse was, in the author's words, "surrounded by stories, those he listened to and recorded, the hundreds he archived in a chest or trunk." His familiar life was turned upside down by the British conquest of the colony. Merwick recounts the changes brought about by the new rulers and imagines the despair Janse must have felt when English, a language he had never learned, replaced his native tongue in official transactions. In any military adventure, truth is alleged to be the first casualty. Merwick offers a poignant reminder that the first casualties are in fact people. As much a musing on what history obscures as what it reveals, her book is a superior work by a master practitioner of her craft.

Genres: History

304 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

Reviews

[Ms211 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good detective stories always start with a death that must be solved. Death of a Notary reconstructs a man’s life in the colonial settlement of Albany, New York. Merwick has written a biography of an unknown Dutch notary that illustrates a larger historical narrative about the rise and fall of Dutch colonization in Albanjii, New Netherlands. Unlike any other historical book this reviewer has read, Merwick writes the book as a notary would with dated small segments in a present-tense voice. Her sources include dense primary source translations that are almost a century old. Merwick based a large part of her book on one source from 1918 by a librarian, Van Laer. The dramatic story told by Merwick as a personal biography about an unknown notary, Adriaen Janse, is also a larger narrative about adaptation to colonial life. Merwick bases her detective work about his life on legal documents. Unfortunately, legal documents mandate that Merwick must take significant liberties with Janse’s thoughts to give a picture of his life.
Merwick’s unique method puts the reader into the present tense life of Adriaen Janse. The reader feels how it must have been for one literate person to be just another cogwheel in the West India Company quest for financial gain. Ultimately, we learn the company failed by an English takeover by military force. As other reviewers have noted, she brings the Dutch world alive with the art of her words. Her detective work from the legal documents of Janse’s life leads to an artistic rendition of a despairing notary. Merwick concludes that he ultimately killed himself due to competition and an inability to adapt to the English takeover. In her microhistory of the notary and Dutch legal system, the reader must know the larger history of Dutch colonization. Once you are aware of the differences between English law and the Dutch, she weaves a powerful story about one man’s inability to assimilate into the English colonial structure.
Merwick intrigues the reader after the first chapter. You quickly learn that she has a different type of history to convey when she starts with the father of Adriaen Janse. Her writing style is present tense and as other reviewers have noted, is maintained throughout the book. The unwavering use of present tense voice can wear on the reader. The sins of the father impacting the son is Merwick’s basic premise. The importance of Adriaen Janse’s father for Merwick’s narrative is two-fold. She can give the beginning of Fort Orange that became part of Albany with the Dutch settlement history. By her detective work about the father, she also teaches the reader of the old country’s business and law structure to help explain the West India Company. “The company makes a fetish of writing.” Each person was to report their observations but also the business of each other. She at times, also has a fetish for writing, she writes too much in tangential guesses in her notary vignettes. The reader realizes the theme for her notary is debt and despair. At the end of Adriaen Janese life, his last letter conveyed desperation about his inheritance. We are unable to form our own opinion as she does not give the entire text in her notes.
After learning the background of his father, we learn that Adriaen Janse has come to New Netherlands. Primary sources are silent about his first two years in New Netherlands. The lack of sources from Janse leads the author into filling the gaps with the conflict between the merchant class and the leader of the colony, Peter Stuyvesant. Chapter three outlines this internal struggle for control of trade and power in Manhatan. Adriaen Janse becomes a meek and poor schoolmaster. In Merwick’s interpretation, the meek schoolmaster explains the silences from the records. Merwick then learns that he moves to Rensselaerswijck. She excellently uses these source gaps to discuss the background of a larger conflict between the patroon Slichtenhorst of Rensselaerswijck, and Peter Stuyvesant. The internal conflict between two leaders in the Dutch settlement is analyzed for the impact on the local populace. Adriaen Janese shows up and becomes a secretary in two years after another gap in her sources. Using his life as a backdrop to the history of early colonization is also a weakness in the narrative due to the lack of documents for years at a time. She also assumes her reader to know the history of the West India Company’s military and colonization attempts in what is now Brazil and New York.
In Chapter 4, she reviewed the next six years of the Rensselaerswijck settlement, renamed Beverwijck. Peter Stuyvesant won the conflict for control of the settlement as director of the West India Company. Merwick describes the six instances of Adriaen Janse that shows up in the records. She used realist Dutch art depictions that are unlike any of her other interpretations of the sources. Why the change here? In her notes for this chapter, she gives the reader her art history lesson on Dutch art. She is just doing the same but with words. While the reader can appreciate the writing style to conjure the image of his placement in court, or at an auction, or a sale of his property, she does not let the text of these sources speak for themselves in any way. She contradicts her attempt at a concrete reality of the source. While this is the weakest chapter in her book, the reviewer understands the day-to-day life within this settlement.
Beverwijck falls from within due to internal competition and natives fighting with the colonists. The English siege off the coast of New York completes the full demise of the colony. There is the story of Adriaen Janses, but he is inconsequential here, he sues for his schoolteacher fees and starts to clerk under the prolific notary. The demise of the Dutch colony and her theme of despair that starts due to Janses’father, she now continues in her detective story of his placement in legal records, Merwick could have expanded on the dynamics of the loss of trade, the indigenous threats, and the infighting but she quickly glosses over these last ten years to get to the English siege.
After this chapter, the reader must muddle through a trip back to Holland, somehow Adriaen Janses is part of the merchants who go to Holland and he declares himself as English. While this seems important to the narrative, Merwick does not explore the process of how he came to repudiate his country for the English colony of New York. She made significant interpretation of other sources to apply to him. Why does she not do the same here? Was this a common history that the reader should know about how Dutch colonists became English? After learning how schoolmasters worked, how Amsterdam travel would have been like, it seems strange that she does not fill in this gap beyond noting it.
The last chapter, like the first, is the most important of her book and her detective story. Here is the most documentation of Adriaen Janses’ notary work and letters. We also learn of his wife’s death, his worry about his interest money from Holland with his cousin’s death, and his mistakes in the English language in his notary documents. She has combined all stories about the people around Adriaen Janses into a history of this transition into an English colony. The shift in law and how the people of Albany navigate the changes from the Dutch system of arbitration to an English system of a jury, witnesses, attorneys add to the significant upheaval beyond the basic language barrier.
Her biography has come to its conclusion with his death. The choice of death due to suicide could have been due to being in his seventies, now impoverished, alone, and melancholia. He could have had more debts that were not found in the sources. Merwick does not explore his age beyond stating that if he were still in Holland, he would be able to go to a home for the elderly. The history of the significant transition to an English county seat and landowners is a peripheral part of her narrative. The detective story ends with Adriaen Janse’s lack of adaptation and despair. She does not explain any alternative to the reason for suicide or his actual assimilation. He does become a notary under the English, he goes to Holland and declares himself English, she ignores that he did attempt writing English for his documents and does not explore the impact of his age in colonial America. Overall, the writing style to tell the history of the overall death of the West India Company and the Dutch system being obliterated by English law is completely unique. Her notes and reference section are completely nontraditional yet informative as she describes her method for the gaps in the documents. She is here to give a different yet powerful detective story through one of the losers in this colonial history of upheaval, Adriean Janses.