page_title: Adriaen van der Donck
section_title: Early political activism
hierarchical_section_title: Adriaen van der Donck / In New Netherland / Early political activism
caption_attribution_description: Español: Negociando la paz con los indios. English: Shows New Netherland citizens smoking a peace pipe with local Indians, possibly at the end of Kieft's War.
context_page_description: Adriaen Cornelissen van der Donck was a lawyer and landowner in New Netherland after whose honorific Jonkheer the city of Yonkers, New York, is named. In addition to being the first lawyer in the Dutch colony, he was a leader in the political life of New Amsterdam, and an activist for Dutch-style republican government in the Dutch West India Company-run trading post.
  Enchanted by his new homeland of New Netherland, van der Donck made detailed accounts of the land, vegetation, animals, waterways, topography, and climate. Van der Donck used this knowledge to actively promote immigration to the colony, publishing several tracts, including his influential Description of New Netherland. Charles Gehring, Director of the New Netherland Institute, has called it "the fullest account of the province, its geography, the Indians who inhabited it, and its prospects … It has been said that had it not been written in Dutch, it would have gone down as one of the great works of American colonial literature."
context_section_description: In New Amsterdam, disgruntled colonists had been sending ineffective complaints to the Dutch West India Company about the Director-General of New Netherland, Willem Kieft, who had begun a bloody war with the Indians against the advice of the council of twelve men. Kieft's War badly damaged relations and trade between the Indians and the Dutch, made life more dangerous for colonists living in outlying areas, and drained the colony's resources. He exacerbated his relationship with the already financially strained colonists by enacting a tax on beaver skins and beer to fund the war.
  In 1645, Kieft tried to mend relations with the Indians and asked van der Donck to assist as a guide and interpreter. At the negotiations, Kieft found himself in the awkward position of coming without the necessary gifts. Van der Donck had not informed Kieft of this important component to negotiations in advance, but happened to have brought an appropriate amount of sewant (wampum), which he loaned to Kieft.
  In return for this favor, Kieft granted van der Donck 24,000 acres (97 km²) on the mainland north of Manhattan in the territory of the Wecquaesgeek in 1646. He named the estate Colen Donck and built several mills along what he named the Saeck Kill, later to become the Neperham River  and today the Saw Mill. The estate was so large that locals referred to him as the Jonkheer ("young gentleman" or "squire"), a word from which the name "Yonkers" is derived. By this time, van der Donck had already married the Englishwoman Mary Doughty, whose father had lost his land after irking Kieft.
  Kieft remained out of favor with the colonists in New Amsterdam. Adriaen van der Donck stepped into this environment of political unrest and used his rhetorical legal skills to give voice to the disaffected colonists. Upon his arrival, the tone of the colonists' petitions suddenly changed. While ostensibly putting himself at Kieft's disposal as a lawyer and a translator, he was working with disgruntled members of the community to get Kieft recalled and convince the company of the need for a Dutch-style representative government in New Amsterdam.
  The Dutch West India Company did decide to remove Kieft from his post in 1645, citing the terrible damage caused to trade by his war against the Indians. But rather than yield to the colonists' requests for the establishment of local government, the company decided that a stronger Director-General would succeed in squelching political dissent. They chose Peter Stuyvesant. Despite this change, van der Donck continued his flurry of documents against Kieft, apparently using his example now solely to make a case for the creation of a local government.
caption: Negotiating peace with the Indians
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