Old Silver Nails: How Peter Stuyvesant Lost His Leg
Perhaps for many people the most well known inhabitant of New Netherland is Director-General Peter Stuyvesant, and his most notable physical feature was, in his later years at least, a wooden leg. Let’s see how he became Peg Leg Pete.
Stuyvesant entered the service of the Dutch West India Company as a young man, and in 1630, age 20, he was appointed commercial agent on Fernando de Noronha, an island 220 miles off the coast of Brazil. After five years he was transferred to the mainland, to the rich sugar- producing Brazilian state of Pernambuco, which the Dutch had gained control of in 1630. There was a scene change, and by 1638 Stuyvesant had become the chief commercial officer in Curaçao, forty miles off the coast of Venezuela and the West India Company’s principal naval base in the Caribbean. Clearly the company had a high regard for his administrative and military skills, and this led to his appointment, less than three years later, in 1642, as governor of the Dutch Caribbean possessions known as the ABC islands: Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao.
Stuyvesant was far from a deskbound governor, and he pursued his responsibilities with considerable energy. With the Netherlands engaged in the seemingly endless war with Spain,Stuyvesant undertook a policy of aggressive engagement with Spanish military and commercial interests in the West Indies, including an attack on the nearby Venezuelan settlement of Puerto Cabello. But his primary anti-Spanish focus was organizing an expedition to recapture the island of St. Martin (Dutch Sint Maarten), captured by the Spanish in 1633.
St. Martin is one of the Leeward Islands, a link in the chain of the northern Lesser Antilles stretching in a curve between Puerto Rico and Guadeloupe. The Dutch had discovered the island’s salt ponds in the 1620s, established a settlement, and built Fort Amsterdam there in The first governor was Jan Claeszen van Campen. Just to the east of Puerto Rico, it was a handy stopover between the West India Company’s interests in New Netherland and Brazil.
With the intention of stifling Dutch commerce and privateering in the Caribbean, and in the abiding hostile spirit of the Eighty Years War, in 1633 the Spanish sent a raiding party under Admiral Cadereyta to capture St. Martin. Van Campen refused to surrender in spite of having fewer than 200 troops, so the Spanish ships proceeded to engage in a heated artillery exchange with the fort. Following this, a thousand soldiers and several hundred sailors disembarked and stormed the fortifications. The defenders prevented a successful assault, so the Spanish established a siege with a heavy gun battery, followed by further attacks. Some days later a badly wounded van Campen judged the situation to be hopeless; he asked for and was granted terms of surrender on behalf of his severely outnumbered garrison. Cadereyta took over in the name of Spain, occupying the fortress, and strengthening the defenses by adding many heavy guns and installing an increased garrison. The victorious Spanish fleet sailed for Puerto Rico with Dutch prisoners and three captured ships.
This defeat was an intolerable humiliation for the Dutch, and, on a practical level, the loss of the island was a problematic reduction of their business and military presence in the Caribbean. The Dutch missed access to St. Martin’s valuable saltpans as well as its proximity to Puerto Rico, a Spanish possession that the Dutch had failed to capture in 1625—another of his country’s failures that Stuyvesant might have felt the urge to redress. As a matter of honor, as well as for more tangible reasons, Stuyvesant considered it a fundamental gubernatorial duty to reverse the eleven-year-old disgrace at the hands of the enemy. In the spring of 1644 he took afleet of a dozen ships and over a thousand men to St Martin to fulfill this mission.
Having crossed some six hundred miles of the Caribbean, Stuyvesant laid siege to theSpanish fortifications on St. Martin, anchoring close to shore, landing several hundred troops,and setting up a battery of cannon on the heights. Called upon to surrender on March 22, governor Diego Guajardo Fajardo refused, in spite of the fact that the defenders’ morale was low, their equipment poor, and their rations less than sufficient. Consequently on the following day Stuyvesant began a bombardment, and heavy cannon fire was exchanged between the opponents.
Though the Dutch persisted in their efforts, the upshot of this raid was another failure, with the Spanish maintaining possession of the fortress. At the end of March two attempts were made to infiltrate the Spanish defenses, but both were repelled after a firefight. Two weeks later in the middle of April a shallow-hulled Puerto Rican coaster succeeded in resupplying the fort, which naturally had a negative effect on the besiegers’ will and their capacity to prevail.
But it was a single random event of huge significance that helped ensure that the Dutch campaign in St Martin would not succeed. This was when Stuyvesant was severely wounded during the March 23 artillery barrage. While he was standing close to his cannon battery that was pouring fire into the enemy, a Spanish cannonball flew from the fort and crushed or took off the Dutch commander’s right leg below the knee. He was quickly taken aboard ship for medical treatment, which in this case would mean the awful experience of amputation.
Inevitably the consequence of Stuyvesant’s wound was that the Dutch force was left with an incapacitated leader no longer on the scene of battle, with an inescapable negative effect on the army’s morale and resolve, as well as the sudden absence of on-the-spot orders concerning strategy and tactics. This blow had a destabilizing effect on the outcome of the fight, and four weeks after his injury, still in terrible pain, Stuyvesant was forced to call off the attack. In the end, the Dutch spiked or destroyed their guns, withdrew their ships, and sailed for St. Eustatius and on to Curaçao.
Then as now, the main risks of amputation were hemorrhage, shock, and sepsis. Arterial ligation was a known medical practice, but the first use of a tourniquet to control bleeding on the battlefield was by a French army surgeon called Etienne Morel at the siege of Besançon during the Franco-Dutch War in 1674—thirty years after Stuyvesant needed one. In any case, Stuyvesant’s blood flow was contained by quick-thinking troops and fatal contamination from island dirt, bugs, and his filthy clothing was kept from lethally invading the bloody tatters of his leg, and he lived.
From our viewpoint it’s difficult to imagine suffering such an injury in those conditions, and, more to the point, what it was like to undergo a seventeenth century wartime shipboard emergency amputation, and subsequent recovery—if you did recover. Two kinds of luck were present for Stuyvesant on that fateful day: bad luck to have been wounded, and good luck to have lived to tell the tale—to have survived both the cannonball and the naval surgeon’s treatment.
In our mind’s eye we can see a perhaps semi-conscious Stuyvesant carried back aboard his flagship, perhaps down to the surgeon’s cramped, candle-lit quarters below decks, but more likely to Stuyvesant’s own brighter handy cabin aft, where a chart table was swept off with a clatter and he was laid upon it. The surgeon probably ordered two or three reluctant soldiers to hold their commander down as he opened his instrument case and wiped his sharp knife on a grubby sleeve and set out his bone saw. Given the primitive state of medical skill and knowledge at the time, amputation was almost always a surgery of last resort. It was often easier and safer to chop off a limb than try to mend it, and a cannonball strike would have left no choice.
Before the first use of a general anesthetic in the mid-nineteenth century, patients often opted for death rather than enduring the excruciating ordeal of surgery of any kind. Stuyvesant seems the sort of man—and the sort of obstinate responsible commander—who would choose life, if feasible. Unfortunately for Stuyvesant, the availability of ether, chloroform, and morphine was two centuries in the future. The lack of analgesics and narcotics dictated that the surgery had to be completed quickly, with nothing more than a few good swigs of rum to ease the pain (and probably some for the doctor too). And of course, no medical man of the time had the faintest clue about microbes, infection, sterilization, antibiotics, or just the need for basic hygiene—in any case this being something hard to achieve under the best contemporary circumstances. It would be a long time before the medical world recognized the need for cleanliness and sanitation, and so little was known about bacteria and germs, even up to the time of the US Civil War, that bandages were used over and over, and on different people, without being cleaned. Throughout history, wounds that could be treated easily today quickly became infected, making amputation so often unavoidable.
Stuyvesant’s amputation required a long convalescence, and a few months later in August of that year he returned home to the Netherlands. Here a kind of new mobility was found as he was fitted with a wooden leg, resulting in the acquisition of a collection of somewhat affectionate nicknames, such as “Peg Leg Pete,” “Old Peg Leg,” and “Wooden-Legged Peter.” He was also known as “Old Silver Nails,” “Old Silver Leg,” and “Silver Leg,” because he had his prosthesis studded with silver nails or bands. In the New World the Indians called him “Father Wooden Leg.”
The sense of dishonor or embarrassment that the Dutch must have felt for failing to retake St. Martin didn’t last long. The Spanish hung on there until they quit the island four years later in 1648 under the conditions of the Peace of Münster, one of the treaties of the Peace of Westphalia, which largely ended the European wars of religion. After the Spanish left, Dutch and French colonists arrived. Following some initial conflict, in 1648, while Stuyvesant was adjusting to a new job in North America, both countries signed the Treaty of Concordia (on Mount Concordia on St. Martin) that divided the island in two, allowing and encouraging the two populations to share the natural resources and to coexist in a friendly and cooperative way. So following their military stumbles, in the end the Dutch succeeded in getting half an island.
The tough character we have come to know in the future Director-General of New Netherland is surely detectable in Stuyvesant’s earlier years. The loss of a leg and the need to maneuver around on an uncomfortable wooden replacement seems to have slowed Stuyvesant down only temporarily, for during the hard recovery from the injury he managed to find himself both a wife and a demanding new job. He had been recuperating in Amsterdam for several months when the West India Company chose him to take the place of Willem Kieft as Director-General of New Netherland. The autocratic and troublesome Kieft had been in the position since 1638, and the company’s Board of Directors had just fired him. Stuyvesant accepted the post, and while awaiting confirmation of this appointment he wooed and married Judith Bayard, the daughter of a Huguenot domine in Breda.
Accompanied by his bride, Stuyvesant left Amsterdam in December 1646, first heading for Curaçao and then north to America, reaching New Amsterdam in August 1647, ready to begin his memorable new career. This lasted for seventeen years, until the English takeover in 1664. In 1665 Stuyvesant sailed to Amsterdam to report, and returned to New York in 1668, retiring to his farm outside the city until his death in 1672. After having survived the Spanish cannonball on St. Martin, Stuyvesant claimed that this was a sign that God had spared him for great things. He was right—it turns out he had found his place in history.
