They were no polished pioneers but “beggars in a shabby mudhole”: the ragtag first two hundred Dutch settlers who, four centuries ago, planted a foothold on the southern tip of Manhattan. American author Sherril Tippins is bringing them back to life in her forthcoming book The First Two Hundred. Best known for her books February House and Inside the Dream Palace, she has traded the bohemian salons of modern New York for the swampy origins of its colonial past.
As senior journalist of leading Dutch newspaper NRC notes, Tippins’ work is livelier and more real than anything yet written about New Amsterdam, revealing far more of how its people actually lived. Since 2017 Tippins has immersed herself in ledgers, court files, and divorce petitions — “but it’s wonderful to see the towns and landscapes these people came from,” she says from her room at NIAS in Amsterdam, where she returned last summer to continue her research with fresh fieldwork.
Everyone knows Russell Shorto’s The Island at the Center of the World, but Tippins goes further: not a parade of governors like Peter Stuyvesant but, as she puts it, “the ordinary people who, as best they could, tried to survive — a history from the bottom up.” Nine names rise almost alive, among them Grietje Reyniers, the Amsterdam barmaid infamous for “measuring her customers’ manhood with a broomstick.” Tippins restores her full story: exiled with her husband — the son of a Barbary pirate — only to return as prosperous farmers, “an early American success story,” she laughs.
And there’s a delicious twist of history: among Reyniers’ descendants are heiress and designer Gloria Vanderbilt and CNN journalist Anderson Cooper. “He knows it, he thinks it’s funny,” Tippins says. “It isn’t strange — the Dutch colonists intermarried a great deal, and later with the British after New Amsterdam changed hands.”
With Tippins’ meticulous research and flair for the unruly, the marshy outpost of New Amsterdam feels close enough to smell the brine and hear the quarrels.
Read the wonderful interview in Dutch here.
