by Jeroen Dewulf

The available archival sources on New Netherland’s enslaved community are limited in number. Due to the paucity of sources, many questions about this community have remained unanswered. Since it is unlikely that new sources will be discovered, a comparative approach can help us find answers. In this respect, St. Thomas, today part of the US Virgin Islands, is a place of interest that has hitherto not been studied in parallel to New Netherland. Although attempts by the West India Company to colonize the islands never materialized, the Dutch presence in the archipelago coincided with the establishment of New Netherland and, similar to what occurred in Manhattan, Dutch settlers relied on enslaved people to do the hard and dangerous labor.

Since the Spanish had made few investments to defend the archipelago of Santa Úrsula y las Once Mil Vírgenes, the Virgin Islands became easy prey for the Dutch. The first references to their presence in the region date back to the 1610s, when the privateer Joost van Dyk attempted to establish a permanent settlement in Tortuga, as a result of which he was later appointed by the WIC as patroon of the island. Similar to what was to occur with Willem Hunthum’s plantation on Virgin Gorda, however, Van Dyk’s settlement failed to develop due to Spanish attacks from nearby Puerto Rico as well as rivalries with French and English competitors.

In spite of this, other Dutchmen persisted in their attempts to establish plantations on the Virgin Islands. Significantly, when the Danish West India Company took possession of the island of St. Thomas in 1661, its first governor, Jørgen Iversen Dyppel, encountered dozens of European settlers on the island he had assumed to be uninhabited. The vast majority of them were Dutch. It is unclear when and how Adriaan de Vos, Joost van Campenhout, Pieter Pietersen, Andries Zijgerts, Cornelius Jansen, Pieter de Buyk and others had arrived in St. Thomas. They were, in any case, experienced planters who possessed an unknown number of enslaved workers.

Their experience and numerical superiority allowed the Dutch to maintain a privileged role under Danish rule. A 1688 survey reveals that St. Thomas counted ninety estates that were inhabited by a total of 370 white and 422 enslaved people. Of the white families, seventeen were French, eighteen Danish, thirty English and no less than sixty-three Dutch. Not surprisingly, thus, the language used in the island’s administration was initially not Danish but Dutch. Dutch remained the only language used in the Reformed Church of St. Thomas until 1827, when it transferred to the Classis of New York and, in 1828, brought Abraham Labagh to the island, the first minister to preach in English.

Dutch also became the lingua franca of the enslaved community, albeit in a creolized form, known as Negerhollands (Negro Dutch). Its most famous word is Tappus, as derived from the Dutch taphuis (taphouse), the vulgar name of the island’s capital, officially denominated Charlotte Amalia. The creole language also spread to nearby St. Croix and St. John, where it remained the common language of the Black community until English became dominant in the course of the nineteenth century. It nevertheless continued to be spoken until Alice Stevens, its last native speaker, passed away in 1987.

There are few other places in the Americas where the enslaved community has been better documented than in St. Thomas. Unfortunately, this documentation starts only with the arrival of missionaries of the Moravian Church in 1732 and very little information is available about earlier decades. In spite of this, some insights may contribute to a better understanding of what occurred in New Netherland. One of these applies to religion. Not unlike in New Netherland, the Dutch Reformed Church in St. Thomas opened its doors to members of the Black community. Sources indicate, however, that access to the church was limited to those who stood close to the slaveholding elite and occupied positions of leadership such as overseer or militia leader. There are also indications that members of the Black community tended to perceive membership of the Reformed Church as something distinctive that made them superior to others. Significantly, when Moravian missionaries began to reach out to the entire enslaved community, they faced opposition not only from white slaveholders, but also from members of the Black elite. Although the Reformed Church in New Netherland possibly had a different approach, the case of St. Thomas suggests that, there too, it may never have been the intention to convert the entire Black community but rather to build a group of loyal allies. It also suggests that those who joined the Reformed Church in New Netherland may have done so with the intention to build a close relation with the slaveholding elite in order to improve their social status. The frequency with which the Black militia captain Bastiaen was recorded as a baptismal witness may be indicative of this intention, as are references to certain members of the Black community assisting the Dutch in recapturing Black escapees.

Another matter of interest is language. Unlike in Curaçao, where a Portuguese-derived creole known as Papiamento became the lingua franca of the Black community, the creole language that developed in St. Thomas was derived from Dutch, albeit with a strong Iberian influence at the level of vocabulary. This different development coincided with different religious policies. While Catholic priests from the nearby Spanish mainland were tolerated in Curaçao, St. Thomas only had Protestant churches. Those who joined the Reformed Church on the latter island were likely also the first ones to adopt Dutch as lingua franca. Since they formed the island’s Black elite, their language became the language of reference for others aspiring to improve their living conditions. A similar relationship between religion and language may have existed in New Netherland, where those who joined the Reformed Church were likely also the first ones to fully embrace the Dutch language.

A final element of interest are references to the celebration of Black community leaders with royal titles, a tradition that in both places was recorded only in the nineteenth century but may have older roots. Similar to the New York Pinkster kings, nineteenth-century newspapers in St. Thomas report on the “absurd exhibition of mock royalty,” with a “king and queen” parading through town, “richly attired in silk and satins.” While it is impossible to say whether both traditions had common origins, references to lower-class Black people in St. Thomas having religiously inspired burial societies with unmistakably Catholic names such as “St. Joseph” and “Mary and Joseph” suggests that this phenomenon developed out of Afro-Atlantic Catholic confraternal traditions.

Although the assumptions presented in this essay are speculative in nature, they show how a comparative methodology, even if applied to places that were not formally Dutch colonies, can help us to acquire a better understanding of the social behavior of New Netherland’s Black community.