Knickerbocker's History of New York, CompleteIrving, Washington
History
Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete
Irving, Washington
New York (State) -- History -- Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775
In fact, the Merrylanders and their cousins, the Virginians, were
represented to William Kieft as offsets from the same original stock as
his bitter enemies the Yanokie, or Yankee, tribes of the east; having both
come over to this country for the liberty of conscience, or, in other
words, to live as they pleased; the Yankees taking to praying and
money-making and converting Quakers, and the Southerners to horse-racing
and cock-fighting and breeding negroes.
Against these new invaders Wilhelmus Kieft immediately despatched a naval
armament of two sloops and thirty men, under Jan Jansen Alpendam, who was
armed to the very teeth with one of the little governor's most powerful
speeches, written in vigorous Low Dutch.
Admiral Alpendam arrived without accident in the Schuylkill, and came upon
the enemy just as they were engaged in a great "barbecue," a king of
festivity or carouse much practised in Merryland. Opening upon them with
the speech of William the Testy, he denounced them as a pack of lazy,
canting, julep-tippling, cock-fighting, horse-racing, slave-driving,
tavern-haunting, Sabbath-breaking, mulatto-breeding upstarts: and
concluded by ordering them to evacuate the country immediately; to which
they laconically replied in plain English, "They'd see him d----d first!"
Now this was a reply on which neither Jan Jansen Alpendam nor Wilhelmus
Kieft had made any calculation. Finding himself, therefore, totally
unprepared to answer so terrible a rebuff with suitable hostility, the
admiral concluded his wisest course would be to return home and report
progress. He accordingly steered his course back to New Amsterdam, where
he arrived safe, having accomplished this hazardous enterprise at small
expense of treasure, and no loss of life. His saving policy gained him the
universal appellation of the Savior of his Country, and his services were
suitably rewarded by a shingle monument, erected by subscription on the
top of Flattenbarrack Hill, where it immortalized his name for three whole
years, when it fell to pieces and was burnt for firewood.
CHAPTER X.
About this time, the testy little governor of the New Netherlands appears
to have had his hands full, and with one annoyance and the other to have
been kept continually on the bounce. He was on the very point of following
up the expedition of Jan Jansen Alpendam by some belligerent measures
against the marauders of Merryland, when his attention was suddenly called
away by belligerent troubles springing up in another quarter, the seeds of
which had been sown in the tranquil days of Walter the Doubter.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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