Rocky Cape Christian Community

ca. 1625 – ca. 1700

Excerpts from the work of Leland Harder, Erika Klap, Bart Plantenga, and K. Varden Leasa
 

Hutterite girls at the site of Zwaanendael, Lewes, Delaware, 2002.

Pieter Cornelisz Plockhoy

grew up on the Dutch island of Schouwen-Duiveland, about one hundred kilometres southwest of Amsterdam. His family was Mennonite. Not only that, they were Mennonites of a group known as the Stilstaander, an enlightened spiritually-minded fellowship that refused to take sides in the many divisions that had broken up the Anabaptist movement in the Netherlands by their day.

Pieter’s Home Town

Zierikzee, Pieter’s island hometown, was the heart of the Dutch seafaring province of Zeeland. Inhabited since 2000 BC it was a “round city,” still ringed by fourteenth-century walls and moats. But no matter how old it was or looked, Zierikzee—like all Dutch cities in the 1600s—was a centre of “modern” ideas and trade.

Long before Pieter’s birth the Dutch had already begun to question papal authority and other hallowed institutions of European society. Science, logic, and pragmatism threatened traditional orthodoxies. Rampages of iconoclasm – the smashing of Catholic images – by roving bands led by Protestant nobles and Calvinist exiles occurred in Zeeland and throughout Holland. Plockhoy’s youth coincided with Zierikzee’s heyday, Holland’s Golden Age and the ascension of artists like Vermeer and Rembrandt. Holland was a world power and a unique society characterized by a deep estrangement from traditions, making it, arguably, the first modern society.

Zierikzee’s ships, loaded with salt, herring, cloth, brandy, lumber, and farm products sailed throughout the Mediterranean and Europe, up to Denmark and the Baltic, connecting Holland with new worlds and old. Its fishing fleet ventured as far as Iceland to fish for cod. But they were vulnerable to attack by Spanish, French, or English warships (or Dunkirkers and other privateers hiring on with anyone who would have them) intent on challenging Dutch shipping prowess. Herring boats were escorted by warships, but to no avail. William of Orange’s provisional government even sanctioned hero-pirate, Piet Heyn, to commit high seas misdeeds. In true swashbuckling style, he captured Spain’s Silver Armada in 1629.

Zierikzee was the West India Company’s second principal port after Amsterdam and its ships (including slave ships) sailed to the New World and returned loaded with pelts or tobacco. Textile salesmen, fishermen, and butter merchants combed Zierikzee’s bustling market for bargains while rambunctious sailors on leave killed time with drink and other more sinful diversions. Both Erasmus and Albrecht Dürer noted how annoyingly noisy Zierikzee was.

Pieter’s Conversion

Young Pieter’s best friend in Zierikzee was the medical student Geleyn Abrahamsz de Haan, son of the elder of their Mennonite congregation. Not content to just “get baptised” and “go to meeting” both young men determined, after giving their lives to Jesus, that they would serve him with everything they had. Serving Jesus by serving the poor, made much sense to them, and with all the fighting going on in Europe (during the heat of the eighty years’ war) they wanted nothing more than to be his instruments of peace.

In 1646 Geleyn moved to Amsterdam where he combined his medical practice with spiritual and social work among needy souls. The large Mennonite congregation bij ‘t Lam (by the Lamb) chose him for their assistant pastor, and Pieter also moved to the city, a few years later, to work among the poor.

In Amsterdam both young men found fellowship with the anti-sectarian Collegiants, a Dutch ecumenical group that sought to bring about the peaceful reign of Christ by replacing doctrine, the clergy, creeds—in effect, all organized religion—with collegia prophetica, Taizé-like meetings where believers could meet to study and pray together.

Drawing not only Mennonite and Reformed participants, but earnest seekers of many varied backgrounds, the Collegiants favoured tolerance for all opinions, freedom of thought and conscience, reason over tradition, no state church, no professional clergy and almost no organization. (Not so twentieth-century sounding was their belief that “divine truth must be confirmed by signs and miracles.”) In the course of time, both Geleyn and Pieter became convinced that these collegia were the “only way to abolish all lording over consciences.” But Pieter would not stop there.

The Netherlands, at the end of the Eighty Years’ War, was a trade giant. Wages were high, and its ships sailed the world over. Amsterdam’s city hall, constructed in Dam Square in 1650, was called the “eighth wonder of the world” and signalled the Netherlands’ arrival as a world power and Amsterdam as the financial/trade centre of the world – truly the “Empress of Europe.”

At the same time, Dutch artists like Steen, Vermeer, Hals, and Rembrandt, painted humanistic masterpieces (using secular rather than religious themes), expressing Dutch society’s prevailing atmosphere of tolerance and scepticism of established beliefs. Amsterdam became a centre of scientific thought while people of many faiths and philosophies found refuge here: scientists and philosophers considered heretical elsewhere – Mennonites, Jews, Puritans, even Catholics – everyone finding clandestine attics in which to practice what they believed.

Into this setting Pieter Cornelisz Plockhoy arrived in 1648, becoming part at once of a loose fellowship of writers, “lovers of the noble art of poetry,” and artists known as the Parnassis of Y (today spelled “Ij,” the name of the river behind Amsterdam).

These Parnassians (or Reformateurs as they called themselves) were no group of intellectuals or a “counter-culture” band of rebels, but a serious “art school for the promotion of virtue.” They gathered frequently in an informal manner around a table in the Sweet Rest, an inn owned by the group’s “head poet,” Jan Zoet, to engage in heated discussions “of political and philosophical import.” Other members included the renowned Mennonite artist Govert Flinck, the poets Karel Verloove and Jacob Steendam.

They hoped to improve the moral situation of Amsterdam through the “abolition of various customs,” and advance the cause of the poor, which they did by establishing the Oranje-Appel orphanage—working with the Mennonite churches of the city.

During this time Pieter began to write – first in Dutch but eventually also in English – becoming an earnest and tireless enthusiast for what he saw as Jesus’ transformation of society. Then Oliver Cromwell rose to power in England. It seemed to Pieter and some of his friends that England, under Cromwell’s rule, might be a better place in which to realise their goals than in the Netherlands, so by June 1658, he was in London looking for sponsorship for his ideas for an equitable society.

Pieter in London

The mystery of why Pieter thought Oliver Cromwell, the anti-royalist Lord Protector of the Commonwealth with its Puritanical and “reasonable” order, would be sympathetic to him, remains largely unresolved. Perhaps it was Cromwell’s anti-papist sentiments or the public image of his enlightened progressiveness (in 1649 he was the hope of all of Europe’s Protestants). Whatever the case, it is clear that England’s dynamic social climate of poverty and hope, its dizzying stir of prophetic schemes and intriguing ideas, captivated Pieter Cornelisz Plockhoy.

Despite Cromwell’s Blasphemy Act [1650], pamphleteering radicals and street agitators in England continued to rail and present petitions to Parliament, who were busy executing Levellers and banning maypoles, theatrical performances, Sunday strolls, and Christmas.

At the same time the Ranters ranted against the entire idea of sin; the Diggers advocated separation of church and state and equality of the sexes; and female Levellers petitioned Parliament for better education and equality for the poor. And then there were the Quakers, Fifth Monarchists, and Independents. . . . Basically all of them believed government needed a moral soul. In this context it is easy to see how, although an uncommon man, Pieter Cornelisz Plockhoy was also a man of his time and place.

Pieter, however, did not try to overthrow or transform England (or any other European country) right away. He believed it best to establish a new community in the order of the Kingdom of Heaven somewhere removed from the sins of the rest of the world.

With this vision, other seekers aligned themselves to greater or lesser degrees. Samuel Hartlib, a Polish writer living in England, thought one should work at converting the government. Gerard Winstanley, of the Diggers, presented Cromwell with plans for communal utopias. The Leveller, Giles Calvert sought for ways to help the poor and probably published Pieter’s A Way Propounded. William Walwyn, a confirmed Christian communalist, seems to have helped Pieter Plockhoy with the English wording of his tracts, and all of these, in turn, were probably influenced by the German utopian, Johann Andreae’s [1586-1654] blueprints for a geometrically fortified “republic of workers living in equality.”

As soon as he arrived in England, Pieter Cornelisz Plockhoy set to work to win Cromwell’s support for his plans. His first letter, dated June 24, 1658, addressed Cromwell as the “Mighty and (as I hope) Prudent Lord.” The letter, perhaps written with Hartlib assisting with the English, presented his essential ideas of equality in faith, religious tolerance, and the extension of the Lord’s kingdom as understood in the collegia prophetica of the believers in the Netherlands.

In his second letter to Oliver Cromwell, Pieter wrote: “One should leave the world for posterity in a better state than how one found it. I have made this my contribution...” He eventually gained an audience with the Lord Protector of which he reported: “I was heard several times with patience.” Cromwell however, for as patiently as he may have listened, could do nothing for Pieter and his vision of establishing a Christian society at some pristine location overseas. Already ill with ague and fits of malaria, his fragile commonwealth was imploding, and he was worried about the health of his most beloved daughter, Elizabeth. 

After Cromwell died, suddenly, on September 3, 1658, Pieter did not lose courage right away. When the English Parliament opened in January 1659, he redoubled his efforts sending letters to both Parliament and Cromwell’s son and successor, Richard.

That same month he published his pamphlet, The Way to the Peace and Settlement of These Nations… “to awaken Public Spirits” and foster interest among English citizens. The pamphlet, signed “Pieter Cornelius van Zurik-Zee, a lover of truth and peace,” consisted of the two Cromwell letters and one written to Parliament on the subject of the collegia prophetica, which encompassed his (and Hartlib’s) ecumenical vision of religious tolerance and an all-embracing universal church in the Spirit of Jesus.

Pieter’s ideas, however, got largely ignored. A few “well affected persons” showed some interest in developing cooperative communities to “promote so good and pious a work” as providing homes for the poor. They donated 100 pounds each to bring the “little commonwealths” to fruition, two in England (at London and Bristol) and one in Ireland, with plans for more on the mainland. But in 1660, Richard Cromwell’s tenuous hold on power vanished and he fled England, making way for Charles II, who ascended the throne on May 29, 1660, commencing at once a vigorous campaign to suppress opponents.

Times had changed for Pieter and his friends. The new king, Charles II, showed no sympathy for their ideals. Instead of listening to more appeals for justice and reason, he had Oliver Cromwell’s body removed from Westminster Abbey, dragged through the streets and hung in a public square for a day. Then he had Cromwell’s head chopped off and put on a pike to parade it around London, before sticking it onto a fence post in Westminster to horrify passers by for the next 25 years.

That opened Pieter’s eyes to how little a chance he stood of gaining freedom to establish his Christian society in England. Late in 1661 he returned to Amsterdam to try getting permission from the government there.

Preparations in Amsterdam

“…that …Plockhoy … agree to depart by the first ship … to the aforesaid colony … to reside there and to work at farming, fishing, handicrafts, etc. … [so] that provision may thereby be made for others to come.” –Contract signed by the Amsterdam Magistrates and Pieter Cornelisz Plockhoy on June 6, 1662

Between November 1661 and May 1662 Pieter wrote seven letters to the Dutch authorities outlining his settlement proposals. On April 20 1662, Amsterdam’s magistrates finally agreed to let him establish a colony along Delaware Bay, in the Zwaanendael (the “valley of swans” on the site of today’s town of Lewes, in Delaware). Hardly convinced about the project on religious or moral reasons, they agreed to it nevertheless because they felt it might be a good business investment at this point.

Pieter signed the contract in early June and agreed to present “the names of 25 persons, who will agree to depart by the first ship ... to the aforesaid colony ... to reside there and to work at farming, fishing, handicrafts, etc., and to be as diligent as possible not only to live comfortably themselves, but also that provision may thereby be made for others to come.” In exchange, Plockhoy negotiated a 25-year tax exemption for his colony, the right to much of the profits and to choose as much territory as they could develop, plus the right to make their own laws. Amsterdam’s magistrates offered loans of 100 guilders to each man. Women and children travelled free.

In his 84-page promotional tract Korte Verhael van Nieuw Nederlants, (“A Brief Account of New Netherland...”), published in October, Pieter announced his intention to found a settlement for “many poor and needy families.” In it he tried to allay the fears of those that felt his insistence of communal equality would mean a loss of their individuality. He also reassured his sponsors that although his experimental community would be based on moral concerns, it would still be profitable and competitive in the marketplace.

His collaborative and not so brief Kort en Klaer Ontwerp… (“Brief and Concise Plan…”) sounded more like a travel brochure meant to lure settlers to a mythical land of limitless abundance. “New Netherland is the flower, the noblest of all lands … birds obscure the sky, so numerous in their flight, the animals roam wild … fish swarm in the waters and exclude the light…”

At the same time, poems appeared by his old Parnassis friends, Steendam and Verloove, to encourage Pieter and assure his sponsors that his ideas were sound. (Steendam who had lived in New Netherland, 1650–1660, wrote glowing reports from the New World, touting its many virtues – “the purity of the air...” – making him, arguably, not only the New World’s first poet but also its first publicist.)

With all this in place, Pieter zealously set about recruiting the right people from four categories – “Husbandmen, Craftsmen, Mariners and Masters of Arts & Sciences” – idealists with skills befitting the project. He offered attractive inducements and the thrill of adventure. In September, provisions were collected and a ship secured. His efforts produced underwhelming results, however. He had hoped against hope to enlist 100 families but only managed to persuade twenty-four, many of whom likely came from his and Geleyn’s circle of Collegiant friends.

Finally, on 5 May 1663, the Sint Jacob filled “with their baggage and farm utensils” set sail. On July 28, after two months at sea, they approached land, waded ashore, and stood huddled together on the banks of Delaware Bay, gazing in awe at the marvellous land with “all kinds of necessities and small articles … as for agricultural purposes and clothing, etc. also two half bags of hops, guns for the people...” at their feet.

Arrival in Delaware

“…in such places as are separate from other men where we may with less impediment or hindrance love one another, and mind the wonders of God.” – Pieter Cornelisz Plockhoy

“…the air, land, and sea are pregnant with her bounty …” – Jacob Steendam

The Dutch have a saying: “Mother poverty is the bride of dreamers.” No doubt many of the new settlers on the Atlantic coast of Delaware thought of this wisdom as they trudged up the sandy shore off Cape Henlopen, near the Hoerenkil, negotiating their way through driftwood, dragging provisions and farm implements, with nothing before them but bogs, lush with reeds and never-before-seen flowers and a trail meandering further inland.

It was like a Henri Rousseau canvas: dense, mysterious, primeval forests of towering oak and pine; clearings and banks holding profuse bouquets of flora and wild fruits; cypress near the water, willows in the swamps; and wild fauna – bears, foxes, beavers, eagles, and unknown creatures – in unbelievable abundance. Fish – halibut, mackerel, bass – filled inlets with their silvery flopping bodies almost like Pieter’s tract had promised. Certainly it was no empty canvas of a wilderness – and, as they soon discovered, they were not the only people in it.

The colonists settled in from the shore, near present-day town of Lewes. They had already missed the spring growing season and still had to clear land – felling trees, burning the stumps – for winter crops and begin construction of their “little commonwealth.”

Tensions Pieter had not anticipated arose immediately. He had envisioned friendly relations with the natives but the local Algonquins were mystified by Plockhoy’s claims to the land. A letter written to the Amsterdam magistrates reported that the natives “had declared they never sold the Dutch any land to inhabit.” The land had already been sold several times over (to the Swedes at least once) bypassing tribes who probably had little claim to it.

Most notable among Plockhoy’s neighbors in this sparsely populated area were the Lenni Lenape and Nanticoke tribes. They were portrayed as tall, athletic, trustworthy, and curiously relaxed. They settled local waterways where they fished, farmed, and hunted. According to Dutch scholar, Claes Wassenaer, who, in the 1630s, wrote: “There is little authority known among these nations. They live almost all free.”

Besides these native Americans, Swedish, English, and other Dutch settlers had established themselves in the Delaware Bay area. Forty years earlier, the Dutch captain Kornelius May (for whom Cape May in New Jersey is named) had built Fort Nassau where Gloucester, New Jersey, now stands. Traders came to pursue their fortunes in furs. Swedes and Finns arrived in 1638, but the first permanent Delaware settlement was Pieter Minuit’s New Sweden colony and Fort Christina on the site of present day Wilmington in 1638.

Across the bay, in Maryland, Lord Baltimore and his Catholic colonists used native tribes to harass Dutch and Swedish settlers while they waited for an opportunity to take the area for their own. Pieter Stuyvesant, the Dutch governor of New Amsterdam (New York), built Fort Casimir in 1651, but the entire Delaware Bay area had became a powder keg of territorial rivalries and conflicting claims by the time Pieter Cornelisz Plockhoy arrived to build a community at the Hoerenkil.

Murders went unsolved but were quickly avenged. English merchants regularly filled vessels with guns, alcohol, cloth, and trinkets to trade with Indians for pelts and furs – in defiance of Dutch authority. Even Zwaanendael (the “valley of swans”) where Pieter with his family and friends built their community in 1663, had been settled thirty years earlier and destroyed by the Lenni Lenape.[1]

Now, to build a peaceful community in the midst of all this, did not look easy. With all his heart Pieter wanted to avoid the mistake of the Puritans that used verses from the Bible to justify wiping the Indians from their land. Just as earnestly he wanted to keep fur traders and hucksters from making friends with them, only for the sake of economic advantage. Pieter wanted nothing more than to live with all his neighbours, and particularly with the Native Americans in peace. But he did not have much time to live out what he and his friends believed.

First, the need to build houses and gather food, kept the settlers too busy to make many friends. Pieter himself was kept busier than he expected, simply trying to keep everyone happy and working well together. Totally unfamiliar with life in the wilderness and with living in community, most of the settlers had to be coaxed into taking responsibility and learning new jobs. But the new community, after the first difficult months of settling in, began to take shape and prosper.

Order in the Community at Zwaanendael

Before setting sail for America, Pieter Cornelisz Plockhoy and his friends had decided who should live there and who not. Four kinds of people – farmers, craftsmen, sailors, and teachers of the arts and sciences, that is “only rational and impartial persons,” should be allowed on the common property. On the other hand, anyone that might prove “difficult” – such as “Roman Catholics, Jews that would take interest on money, self-righteous Quakers and Puritans, fool-hardy believers in the Millennium, and obstinate modern pretenders to revelation,” should be excluded.

In their common houses, members of the community were to eat together at long tables, brothers on one side, sisters on the other, “dwelling one with another in mutual courtesy, and using no titles.”

The believers were to acknowledge no one but Christ as their head and master. A co-ordinator or chairman was to be elected annually, for the group. But he was to receive no wages or special privilege for his work. In the large hall at the religious and devotional exercises, which included singing and Bible-reading, everyone was to take turns to speak and all were to keep their speeches short.

No clergymen or capitalists were allowed to live in the community. Up to one hundred families should all live and work together, so that, for example, instead of the work of one hundred women toiling as in separate families, only twenty-five could do the housework, while seventy-five were set free for other productive labours. In like manner, instead of 100 fires, four or five furnaces could heat the whole habitation. Each was to work six hours a day for the benefit of the colony, the rest of the time could be devoted to private interests. The profits of the community were to be divided equally among everyone over twenty years of age, and to the rest in proportion to their needs.

Pieter guiding principal was his deep sense of moral responsibility - compassion for the poor and the eradication of "the great inequality and disorders among men in the world." This, he believed, would come about through the creation of a community of equals, the coming of the kingdom of God to earth, in which unjust gaps between the rich and the poor would no longer exist.

“Be competitive,” Pieter taught the people at Zwaanendael, “but not acquisitive. Be compassionate, but not ruthless.” And he hoped that through hard work and industry in loving community, the economic success of their venture might serve as the inspiration and pattern of many more.

Pieter believed true peace comes from letting go of personal wealth, from living simply, and living for others instead of one’s own advancement. His ideas regarding a "commonwealth of love and equality" can also be found in the English utopian John Bellers' work that influenced Marx. He may also have helped set the stage for experimental societies like the Oneida Community, Richard Owen's Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers, and the early communities of the Salvation Army. 

One scholar considers Pieter Cornelisz Plockhoy the "originator of socialistic and communal views that later led Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Emerson to undertake such a life at Brook Farm," in Massachusetts. Whatever the case, Pieter was among the first Christians in North America to propose the following:

• Anti-Slavery: "No lordship or servile slavery shall burden our company," decided the settlers at Zwaanendael. Their anti-slavery declaration preceded by five years the first published statement against the practice in North America (made by the  Quakers and Mennonites of Germantown in Pennsylvania in 1668). 
• Separation of church and state: The state should promote religious liberty and foster an ecumenical society.
• Freedom of thought, speech, and religion: An ecumenical umbrella that would "suffer all sorts of people (of whatsoever religion they are)."
• Education: Free progressive education, offered by honest capable "spiritual captains," would provide "uplift" for all children (rich or poor, girl or boy). All "handicrafters" would be periodically retrained to learn new trades.
• Health care: Free for the poor, the sick, and elderly. Only if wealthy people come to be cured, should they pay for medical assistance.
• Leisure: "Personal interests, desires, and pleasures" at Zwaanendael were left to the discretion of the individual. Plockhoy believed work was meant for travel and edification, not for wealth.
• Workday: Every member of the community should work six hours daily, six days a week, for the common good. The rest of the time they were free to work at personal projects.
• Charity: The community at Zwaanendael was created for "the relief of many aggrieved and languishing families." Everyone that came was guaranteed shelter, education, food, and employment as the Lord would provide.
• Employment: Empower the poor through gainful work. People working for the common good would lead to the end of human exploitation.
• Management: All members had a chance to manage various socio-economic sectors, assuring that members gained a variety of skills. Maids and housewives had their prescribed functions but also time to develop new skills. This promoted division of labour as well as communal values and self-reliance.
• Private property: Members of the community would care for and manage their household and personal belongings, but all land and industries would be owned collectively. 
• Communistic Individualism: Although members were to "share equally in the labour and its products" at Zwaanendael, Pieter Cornelisz Plockhoy allayed fears that his system would squelch individuality. "The common welfare should be kept in mind without restricting anyone's personal and natural liberty,” he wrote. “To suppress the individual by force, as is usually the practise in the world, is according to our opinion merely deferring the larger evil and making it break out more violently." Everyone at Zwaanendael was to benefit equally from the profits of the community. Every six months surpluses were to be equally distributed.
• Competitiveness: Plockhoy was keen to prove that his benevolent system could compete in the world market. Success meant being more enterprising and industrious. His artisans would produce higher quality goods because of the level of craftsmanship assured by social well-being. He envisioned their products would undersell the competition because of low overhead of their social arrangements.
• Marriage: Marriage outside the community was allowed.
• Departures: Those leaving would not be punished and received their portion of profits and belongings. If there were no profits they would receive an honorarium.
• Democracy: The leader of the community was to be chosen by the settlers for a one-year term to prevent corruptibility. He would have three elected administrators to assist him.
• Public Meetings: "Meeting-places" were to be constructed with amphitheatre seating arrangement and desk tops to write down ideas. The Scriptures were to be read and discussed in an open and egalitarian manner.
• Housing: The settlement at Zwaanendael consisted of two complexes, one inland for twenty to thirty families engaged in industry and agriculture. Another located near the river where he envisioned fisheries and a fleet of trading vessels "to send to Flanders, Holland, France and other places..." Settlers would live in a mix of private family rooms and public space (library, guestroom, playrooms, and school). Pieter wanted it active and dynamic - open spaces for freedom and convenient for meetings as well as quiet sanctuaries and an area for a market. His ideas for a central kitchen area, central heating and light were important modern contributions.
• Meals: Would be communal, meaning less energy and time spent building many small fires for heat and cooking.
• Simple life: Free of baubles and shows of wealth, or "painful and laboursome inventions" obscured the notions of a good and natural life.

Although there are those who insist it was his religious training as a Mennonite that shaped his ideas, it was Pieter Cornelisz Plockhoy’s vision of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, not his background, that allowed him to bring what he grew up with, what necessity demanded, and what Jesus taught, into productive harmony in the “valley of Swans.”

For as long as it lasted. . . .

Zwaanendael Under Attack

Trouble began in the Delaware Bay area soon after the settlers from Amsterdam arrived. Charles Calvert, of England’s Virginia and Maryland territories, came to snoop around, looking for land. Then, in March 1664, King Charles II (the man Pieter had fled from in England), set out to enhance the eminence of his crown with the second Anglo-Dutch War. His legacy of conquest and glory would come at the expense of the Dutch colonists, among them the peaceful Zwaanendael settlement.

In late August 1664, four English men-of-war, under the command of Colonel Richard Nicholls had triumphantly, if anti-climactically, accepted the Dutch surrender of New Amsterdam. Nicholls then dispatched two ships and some soldiers under the command of Colonel Richard Carr to secure the surrender of Fort Casimir, just down river from present-day Wilmington, and the surrounding New Amstel region.

The outgunned Dutch, realizing that any show of resistance would be suicidal, refused to abandon their homesteads to join any fight. Instead, they hoped for a peaceful surrender. The Articles of Surrender were rumored to include religious freedom, retention of land and language. But not everyone hoped for that. Alexander D’Hinoyossa, the flamboyantly corruptible director of the New Amstel region of New Amsterdam and the ever-cantankerous Peter Stuyvesant in New Amsterdam, tried to stoke up passions for a last stand, but to no avail. D’Hinoyossa and some ragtag followers retreated to Fort Casimir, just down river from present-day Wilmington, to mount a mostly ceremonial sputter of resistance – more vainglorious biography than patriotic effort.

Carr however, was in no mood to negotiate with reprobate resisters and demanded submission or be forced to an “entire obedience.” There was a half-hearted show of resistance and so Carr fired two broadsides into the fort, then took it by storm, killing three resisters and wounding ten. The British ransacked Casimir and took prisoners.

Carr, already infuriated by the resisters’ impertinence, was in no mood to accept any dignified surrender of the surrounding settlements. In a fit of arrogant pique, he pillaged the settlements even though settlers offered no resistance. He seized property, harvests, some 200 sheep, horses, and cows, destroyed a brewery, a sawmill and, it is said, sold the surviving soldiers and Dutch-owned slaves into slavery in Virginia. Most of the rest took oaths of allegiance to the English throne – it was either that or face the consequences. And Nieuw Amstel became New Castle.

Carr then sailed eighty miles southward to the sad excuse for a fort, Fort Sekonnessinck. This was taken with no resistance. And further inland he found the believers at Zwaanendael, near the Hoerenkil (also spelled Hoornkil, Horekil and Whorekill). On a humid September 4, the Zwaanendael sentry may have caught a glimmer off the sword of one of Carr’s soldiers. No one suspected the worst.

Carr’s regiment of wide-eyed, half-drunk, illiterate country boys in threadbare breeches, shabby boots, and makeshift redcoats stood stiff as a row of bowling pins a few hundred meters away across a field of golden corn, matchlock muskets drawn. Dread hung in the cumbrous air. What now?

Carr, with sword raised, marched his troops into Zwaanendael in close formation, plumes jiggling on their caps to the drummers’ fearsome beats. Perhaps further awkwardness ensued as the settlers refused to resist. Carr ordered the settlement’s total destruction. Troops plundered provisions and livestock, demolished the colony, leaving only traces of smoldering rubble – ashes to ashes, dust to dust – departing with spoils in tow. Some historians maintain that several settlers were slain, others driven into the wilderness and, as Stuyvesant notes in his diaries they had “demanded good treatment, which however they did not obtain, they were invaded, stript bare, plundered, and many of them sold into slavery in Virginia.” Rumors arose that some stragglers even found their way back to Holland. Others remained to farm the region as English subjects.

Some believe Carr took it out doubly on the Zwaanendael settlers because they were viewed as enemies of the crown, associated with the hated Levellers and various utopians Pieter had befriended during his London days. In Carr’s eyes, a bunch of eccentrics and seditious heretics, and his mission to root them out was merely extending policies already enacted in England. To this end he followed orders beyond any call of duty.

New Amstel’s governor Van Sweringen noted at the time that Carr succeeded in “destroying the quaking society of Plockhoy to a naile.” But that is not quite the end of the story.

Seven years after Carr’s raid on the Zwaanendael community, the new British government took a census, in May 1671. From that census record, as interpreted by the modern historian Peter Craig, we learn that in 1671 “there were no European settlers south of New Castle until one reached the Whorekill, presently known as Lewes, Sussex County, Delaware. A fort had been established at this location by the Dutch in 1659, but no settlement took place until July 1663, when Pieter Cornelisen Plockhoy and forty other Mennonites arrived from Amsterdam on the St. Jacob. When the English captured the Delaware in 1664 the Whorekill settlements were plundered. By 1671 the community was a mixture of Dutch and English residents.”

Obviously, the settlement founded by the believers from Amsterdam lived on after being plundered by the British – probably not in the utopian form Pieter had envisioned, but in some way nevertheless. And from the records we learn that “the census was taken by Plockhoy’s brother-in-law, Helmanus Wiltbanck. Wiltbanck was married to Plockhoy’s sister, Janneken Cornelis. In 1671, the Wiltbancks had two children: Cornelis and Abraham. Pieter Plockhoy’s brother, Harmen Cornelisen, was also living at Whorekill in 1671, and like the Wiltbancks, probably was an original settler of the colony. . . . Analysis of this census shows that Pieter Cornelisen Plockhoy from Zierikzee, Zeeland, Netherlands, had died soon after the Mennonite settlement was established and that his widow, who remarried Willem Clasen, was also dead [in 1671]. Leadership of the settlement had passed to Plockhoy’s brother-in-law Helmanus Wiltbanck.” It looks like this Willem Clasen was another of Plockhoy’s first settlers. Widow Plockhoy and Willem Clasen had two daughters. One of them, Elizabeth, appears to have married John Hill in the early 1680s.

The fact that there was a sizable community at Whorekill in 1671 is proof of rebuilding after 1664. They had to rebuild again after a similar destruction in 1673 at the hands of troops from Maryland (who also claimed this region). A couple of men who set out for assistance during the 1673 attack were killed by Indians. Certainly the Delaware Bay area was a dangerous place to live in the 17th century.”

Years later, in the 1690s, Pieter Cornelisz Plockhoy’s blind son and his wife settled in the Mennonite village of Germantown, near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. What became of the rest of the community at Zwaanendael—the first Anabaptist settlement, the first Christian community in the New World—we may not know until Jesus comes.

They lived for Jesus in their time and place. Let us live for him in ours.

Main Sources:

W. E. Griffis, The Story of New Netherland, Boston, 1909

Harder, Leland and Marvin, Plockhoy from Zurick-Zee: The Study of a Dutch Reformer in Puritan England and Colonial America, Newton, 1952

Horst,Irvin B., ‘Pieter Cornelisz Plockhoy: an apostle of the collegiants’The mennonite quarterly review23 (1949)161-185

Plantenga, Bart, The Mystery of the Plockhoy Settlement in the Valley of Swans, Mennonite Historical Bulletin, April 2001

Leasa, K. Varden, Setting the Record Straight on Pieter Plockhoy—Delaware’s First Mennonite, Delaware Mennonite Historical Society, 2002