William Street, was now considerably enlarged, and a new
one was constructed just east of Broadway: these received
names, according to the custom of the Dutch, and were
known as " HoUandia " and " Zeelandia." The gate at
Broadway was closed, and a new one was constructed at the
head of Broad Street, where it was commanded by both the
bastions; the road thence turned along the trench, and in
front of the westerly bastion into Broadway. A gate, or at
least an opening, at Broadway seems to have been restored
within a few years, in compliance with a public demand, but
the gate at Broad Street appears to have remained in use till
the final destruction of the works about the end of the seven-
teenth century.^

An observer, standing at the narrow " Water Poort," look-
ing northwards, in tlie year 1655, saw before him the ditch
of the town " fortification ; " upon its south bank the line of
palisades nine feet high, and upon its north bank the fence
of the Damen farm, formed a vista extending straight up the
hill, towards the North River. Over the ditch a rough bridge
was probably thrown, at the gate, and through it ran a small
rill collected from springs at the foot of the hillside pasture

1 111 1674 an order of council was made for tlie construction of "a little
gate " at Smits Vly, for a foot passage.



TYMEN JANSEN 275

known as the Claaver Weytie of the Damen farm. Over this
streamlet, and upon the east side of the road or present Pearl
Street, a score and more of years after the time of our survey,
the butchers of the town ^ erected slaughter-houses, much as
the poulterers of London, centuries ago, built their scalding-
house over the somewhat similarly situated stream called the
Wallbrook. These slaughter-houses, and the pens for cattle
which were situated opposite them, were long conspicuous
features in this part of the town : at the period of our survey,
however, neither the slaughter-houses nor the cattle-pens
existed. In place of the latter, there stood near the bank of
the trench of the palisades, and in inconveniently close prox-
imity to the gate of the town, the house built more than
twenty years before, by Director-General Van Twiller, for
Tymen Jansen, the master ship-carpenter at New Amsterdam
for the West India Company,

Of Tymen Jansen's antecedents but little appears in the
early records. He was born about the year 1603, and came to
New Amsterdam a young man, for he was in the employ of
the Company before 1633. He was a busy man in his occu-
pation, and during Director Van Twiller's term of office, from
1633 to 1638, he is said, in a report soon after the latter date,
to have " made many repairs, and built new vessels, with a
wood-cutters' boat, and various farm boats and skiffs," so that
the shore opposite his house, and near the foot of the present
Wall Street, must have been the scene of considerable activity
in these first ship-building operations of New York. To the
house was attached almost half an acre of ground.^ The
building must have stood very nearly upon the spot now (1901)
occupied by a stationer's shop under the Seaman's Savings
Bank, but projecting somewhat out into the present Pearl
Street, the road at this place appearing to have originally
curved to the eastward a little more than do the lines of Pearl
Street ; the straightening, doubtless, took place at the time of
building the gate in the palisades, in 1653. Here Tymen

^ Prominent :ihioii<j^ whom were Thomas Robinson and James Burne.

2 His origiual plot, as above stated, contained somewhat more than two acres.



276 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE

Jansen lived for some ten or twelve years with his wife,
Marritie, and his little daughter Elsie, of whose troubled life
in after years, as the wife of Jacob Leisler, mention has already
been made.^ Jansen seems to have prospered, and in 1642
and 1643 he received grants of a considerable tract of land
upon Long Island, covering the site of the present court-house
of Queens County and its vicinity, in Long Island City.
Whether he had grown independent with years, and was
desirous of attending to his own private affairs, or whether he
was not in as high favor with Director Kieft as with his pre-
decessor, does not appear; but we find that in 1644 the Direc-
tor and Council complained of him for neglecting to repair
the yachts " Amsterdam " and " Prins Willem," to which
he responded, somewhat tartly, that " he has done his best,
and cannot know when a vessel is leaky unless those in charge
inform him of the fact; furthermore, that nothing can be done
without means." Jansen, however, like many other pioneers
of the colonies of America, was not fated to attain old age ;
he died before the year 1646, and in that year his widow mar-
ried Dirck Cornelissen, of Wensveen, a carpenter by trade,
who was probably the son of Cornells Leendertsen, the former
business associate of Go vert Loockermans.^

Dirck Cornelissen dying in the year 1648, in the following
year his widow married Govert Loockermans, as previously
mentioned (an^e, page 241), and removed to the house of the
latter at the present Hanover Square. Some time afterwards
Loockermans and his wife sold the shipwright's former house
to one Claes Hendiicksen, and he, in his turn, seems to have
exchanged the property, about the beginning of 1653, with
Sergeant Daniel Litscho, for his house and ground situated

1 See ante, pages 242, 245.

2 Dirck Cornelissen seems to have been something of a practical joker. In
1643, Tomas Broen, a corporal of the garrison, complained to the Council that
while he was on duty, Dirck Cornelissen, carpenter (evidently on the score of
some alleged claim against the West India Comyjany), " took off his (Broen's)
hat, saying : ' Thou art the Company's servant; I '11 pledge the hat for drink,'
taking it away with him, and he hath nailed it on a post in front of his house,
putting a stone in the hat."



TYMEN JANSEN'S HOUSE 277

some distance nearer the fort. (See ante, page 268.) The
sergeant probably built upon a portion of the ground imme-
diately east of the old house, and about at the rear of the
present Seaman's Savings Bank building, and he seems to have
kept his tavern here for several years.

In the mean time, an agreement had apparently been made
by Claes Hendricksen, for the sale of the original house to
Tryntje Scheerenborg, the widow of Hendrick Jansen, the
tailor (whose difficulties with Director Kieft have already
come under our notice,^ and who was drowned in the wreck of
the " Princess " ) ; she had paid a part of the purchase price,
but had died without having received any deed of the prop-
erty. She left two daughters, one of whom was married to
Isaac Kip, a young man, the son of Hendrick Kip, the tailor ;
the other daughter was the wife of Gillis Pietersen, from Gouda,
who was an old employ^ of the West India Company, having
been " master house-carpenter " for that corporation as early
as 1638. In the early part of the year 1653, these parties had
been exceedingly anxious to have their deed of the house pur-
chased by their deceased mother-in-law ; in fact, they brought
a suit against Claes Hendricksen to compel him to furnish
them with a deed, but the court held that they must look to
Sergeant Litscho for that assurance.

In the mean time, the " palisades " and the town gate had
been built, in inconvenient proximity to this house; and
when, a short time afterwards. Sergeant Litscho offered a deed
to Kip and Pietersen, and called upon them for the balance of
the purchase-money remaining due upon the property, they
refused to pay because of the recent encroachments by the
authorities. To appease them, the burgomasters visited the
spot, and after viewing the obstructions, ordered a small guard-
house, which had been built outside the gate, to be removed.
The house of Kip and Pietersen remained for three or four
years blocking up the way ; in 1656 the burgomasters were
obliged to serve upon them an official notice : " Whereas, the
fence of your garden by the Town Gate is standing too near

1 See ante, page 229.



278 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE

the Town Waal, you are therefore ordered to take in your
fence, so that wagons and horses can conveniently pass." ^
Finally, to get rid of the inconvenience arising from the prox-
imity of this house to the gate, the burgomasters decided to
condemn and to demolish the building, which was done in June,
1657, the owners being awarded five hundred and fifty guilders,
or two hundred and twenty dollars for their property. At
about the same time, the adjacent tavern of Sergeant Litscho
seems also to have been removed, though the records do not
show the amount of his award.

1 This order of the burgomasters bears date October 7, 1656. The ""Waal"
referred to is not the line of palisades, but the protection to the shore, by sheet
piling or otherwise. Mr. Valentine has made the mistake of constantly confound-
ing the two.



CHAPTER XX

THE SMITS VLY. — HENDRICK JANSEN'S GRANT. — AUGUS-
TYN HEERMANS AND HIS HOUSE. — MARYN ADRIAENSEN
AND HIS ATTACK ON DIRECTOR KIEFT

PROCEEDING outwards from the town, we have now
reached the district long known as the Smits Vly.
This was a tract of low-lying land between the river shore
and the foot of the hills forming the body of the island; it
stretched along the river from near Wall Street about to the
present Beekman Street, a distance of a quarter of a mile,
and varied in width from about one hundred and fifty to two
hundred and fifty feet. Though doubtless full of springs, it
does not seem to have been sufficiently wet to deter improve-
ment, for portions of it were built upon at a very early date.
The term "vly," as used in this connection, does not exactly
correspond either with the English "valley," or "meadow;"
the Dutch appellation would be perhaps more accurately
rendered as "the Smith's Flats." As to the origin of the
name, nothing is accurately known. Mr. D. T. Valentine,
and a host of others following him, have stated that the place
received its name from Cornells Clopper, a blacksmith who
in 1660 acquired a parcel of ground at the northwest corner
of Maiden Lane and Pearl Street; but a more careful exam-
ination would have shown them that the locality is spoken of
by the same name nearly twenty years before that date, — as
early as 1641.

The land along the East River, from Tymen Jansen's
garden, as far as Maiden Lane, seems to have been originally
acquired by Hendrick Jansen, the tailor, Director-General



280 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE

Kieft's antagonist.^ He was certainly located there as early
as 1639, and had apparently about two acres of ground under
cultivation. His house, according to the results of a careful
collation of many deeds and other historical material, seems
to have stood very near Maagde Paetje, or Maiden Lane,
and to have occupied in part the site of the present building,
No. 195 Pearl Street. In the Seutter View (so-called) of
New Amsterdam, or New York, and in two or three others
which are substantially the same view, though bearing dif-
ferent names, we have a representation, as of about the year
1667, of the buildings along the East River shore, from the
present Wall Street to Maiden Lane. These buildings were
isolated, and plainly in the sight of the draughtsman, and
are not open to the same imputations of inaccuracy as are
several other portions of these views. From the views, the
Hendrick Jansen house appears to have been a small building
of the usual Dutch farmhouse type. Like most of such
buildings, outside of the more thickly settled districts, it
stood with its broadside to the street, towards which its
thatched roof sloped. ^

In August, 1641, Jansen sold a part of his property here,
being his " house, barn, barrack, and arable land, " for 2500
guilders, or about $1000, to a man who afterwards took a
prominent though brief part in the history of the Colony, —
Maryn Adriaensen. Upon the premises there seems to have
been the quite common appurtenance of a small brew-house,
and this, with its apparatus, Jansen retained, agreeing to
remove the same, — which he probably did to the western
portion of his original plot, where he seems to have built a
new house for himself; but this, too, in November, 1642, he
sold to one Willem Adriaensen, describing the property then
as his "garden, dwelling, and brew-house."

1 See ante, page 229, etc.

^ Just adjoining tliis house, at the corner of Maiden Lane, there stood, aa
shown upon the view, another building with its gable end towards Pearl Street.
This was a house which had been very recently built, upon a narrow lot running
along the side of Maiden Lane ; the lot had been acquired in 1 666 by Pietcr
Jansen, a ship carpenter. At the time of our survey, however, this space was
Rot occupied by any building.



AUGUSTYN HEERMANS 281

Upon this latter sale, which was for an equal consideration
with that of the former parcel, — namely, 2500 Carolus guil-
ders, — it was stipulated with great care " that 2-4 guilders for
drink on the bargain shall be contributed by the seller alone
without charging any part to the purchasers. " This appro-
priation of 2-4 guilders, or nearly SIO, for "drink on the
bargain," — being about one per cent on the purchase price
of the property, — shows that the sale of a piece of New
Amsterdam real estate was considered, in the middle of the
seventeenth century, to be an occasion of great dignity and
importance.

Of Willem Adriaensen, the purchaser of this property, we
have but little information ; he is said to have been a cooper
by trade, and to have had lands upon Long Island. When,
or in what manner he parted with his property here in the
Smits Vly we do not know; but within six or seven years
after Willem Adriaensen's purchase, we find the premises in
the possession of one of the most interesting characters of
New Amsterdam, — of Augustyn Heermans, soldier, scholar,
artist, merchant, land-surveyor, speculator, and manorial
proprietor. 1 Heermans was a native of Bohemia, and was
born about the year 1608, in the city of Prague, where his
father, Ephraim Augustyn Heermans, was one of the members
of the city council. In the old Bohemian capital, suiTounded
by vine-clad hills, life passed uneventfully enough, no doubt,
for the young Augustyn, till he was about ten years of age,
— then, the memorable year 1618 came on, and during the
next fifteen years he must have witnessed many of the most
stirring events of the great epoch known as the Thirty Years'
War, of which Prague was the very cradle. As a bright,
adventure-loving boy, he must have gazed with a lively
curiosity upon the historic window in the old palace of
Prague, from which, in the year named, the German Em-

^ Many intereatiiif^ facts respectinj^ Augnstyn Heermans have been brought
out recently in a paper, written for the Maryland Historical Society by General
James G. "Wilson, upon Heermans' " Manor of Bohemia," in Maryland. From it
several of the particulars given in the text are drawn.



282 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE

peror's commissioners and their secretary were thrown into
the castle-trench by the enraged Protestant deputies of the
estates of Bohemia, and upon the heap of litter which won-
derfully enabled them to escape death in their eighty feet
fall. Soon afterwards he must have seen the streets of the
capital filled with troops from all parts of Bohemia, now
urged irrevocably into rebellion against their Austrian,
Roman Catholic ruler Matthias, the head of the German
Empire; a little later, perhaps, he may have watched them
march through the Horse Market and Gate, and into the
Vienna Road, under their bold leader, Count Thurn, to
besiege the emperor in his capital itself.

So, too, he must have seen Prague ablaze with enthusiasm
and with gayety over the coronation of the king whom the
Bohemian estates had chosen, Frederic, Count Palatine of
the Rhine, and of his queen, the beautiful Princess Elizabeth
of England. Then came a change ; on the afternoon of the
8th of November, 1620, all Prague was shaken by the
thunder of the cannon from the White Mountain, three
miles west of the city, where eighty thousand men were
engaged in combat. Among the spectators who crowded
the house-tops and the walls, may well have been the young
Heermans, who from thence could have seen the Bohemian
army melt away, in the course of an hour or so, before the
troops of the emperor, leaving the mountain-sides and plateau*
black with the bodies of more than four thousand slain.

Dark days followed in Prague; the short-reigned king,
Frederic, and his household fled by night; the city was sur-
rendered to the emperor without opposition; a few months
of inaction were allowed to supervene, in order to draw back
to Prague the escaped Protestant leaders ; then the net was
sprung, and the boy Heermans could hear the death-bell
tolling daily for executions of the condemned rebels ; while
the famous Karlsbriicke over the Moldau, so captivating to
a boy of twelve or thirteen, where the river lay with its lake-
like waters and green, willowed islands, was now a place
to be shunned, — for above it was fixed a long row of the




Augustine IIkrrmaxs.
From the portrait by himself on his " Map of Maryland," Britisl\ Museum.



COUNT WALLENSTEIN 283

mouldering heads of the principal men of Prague and of
Bohemia. If Augustyn Heermans' family did not itself
suffer at this time, it must have been fortunate, for it
belonged undoubtedly to the Protestant faction, which had
been previously strong in Prague. However this may have
been, the victorious Romanist party carried matters with a
hard hand, and times grew worse and worse for the van-
quished Protestants, till in 1627 they were given the last
alternative of either abandoning their religion or their
country.

During these gloomy times, young Augustyn Heermans,
now growing up to manhood, must have often seen in the
streets of Prague a tall, thin man with stubby red hair and
small sparkling eyes, and with a stern and somewhat ab-
stracted air, for whom people already made way with a
respectful awe. This person was Count Albert von Wal-
lenstein,^ known then as a man of consummate military
abilities, who was high in favor with the Emperor, and who
had been enriched with scores of the confiscated estates of
the Bohemian nobles. His princely ostentation, leadership
of huge armies, and his vast and obscure designs, which
alarmed the German court, and which led alike to Wallen-
stein's tragical end and to his enshrinement in Romance and
in Poetry, were yet in the future.

It was about in the year 1625 that Wallenstein disclosed
his design of forming a great army for the service of the
harassed emperor, whose rebellious Protestant states were
now assisted by various foreign countries; this army was
to be raised and partly maintained at Wallenstein's own
expense, but principally by exactions upon the Protestant
territories. The plan was soon afterwards carried into effect ;
and among those who entered the service of the great leader
was Augustyn Heermans. Whether necessity led to his thus
entering a service which in some respects is not likely to
have been congenial to him we cannot tell. He is said to

1 More strictly Waldstein ; the other appellation has been appropriated, how-
ever, by history and by poetry.



284 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE

liave served in Wallenstein's army through several cam-
paigns, and was present at that general's defeat by the
Swedes, in November, 1632, at the battle of Lutzen, in
which the head of the Protestant cause, the great Gustavus
Adolphus, King of Sweden, lost his life.

It was perhaps during the temporary breaking up of
Wallenstein's army after the battle of Lutzen, that Heer-
mans found an opportunity of leaving the service and of
coming to America. He is said to have come over as the
clerk, or agent of the firm of Gabry and Sons, merchants at
Amsterdam,^ and was certainly for many years their factor
at New Amsterdam. Though he had grown up in a dis-
tracted period, he seems to have been a man of considerable
attainments, and is said, in addition to his own Bohemian, to
have had some acquaintance with the Latin, German, Eng-
lish, Dutch, French, and Spanish languages, — one or two
of these, indeed, he may have picked up in Wallenstein's
polyglot army.

Soon after Heermans' arrival in New Netherland, and in
the course of the year 1633, he seems to have been despatched
to the Dutch settlements on the South, or Delaware River,
and while there he was present and a witness, at the purchase
by one Arent Coersen from the Indians of a tract of land near
the mouth of the Schuylkill River, which land is supposed to
have extended very near to, if it did not actually include, the
site of the present city of Philadelphia. Augustyn Heermans
now, for a number of years, appears to have remained quietly
at New Amsterdam, attending to the mercantile concerns of
his principals. Probably before the year 1651 he had built
a large brick storehouse upon Pearl Street between the old
church and the fort. This, in its day, was one of the most
substantial buildings in the town ; ^ it occupied a site, upon
which there is reason to believe had previousl}' stood, for a
number of years, a smaller storehouse of the Gabrys ; and the

^ See additional particulars respecting Heermans, ante, page 53, etc.
2 Its value was appraised in 1653 as 8500 guilders, or 3400 dollars of the
present currency.



HEERMANS AT NEW AMSTERDAM 285

larger building appears to have been only held in trust for
that firm by Heermans. A short time before this period,
or about in the year 1647, Heermans had acquired a plot of
something over an acre of ground, lying just north of Burger
Jorissen's land in Hanover Square; it was an interior parcel,
to which access was had through the narrow lane called the
"Slyck Steegh," previously described. ^ It was leased and
used for garden purposes for many years by Allard Anthony,
but after the opening of Smith (or the present William)
Street, which intersected it, it was sold off in lots by Heer-
mans about the year 1660.

In the mean time, prior to 1649, Heermans had become
possessed in some uncertain way, as above stated, of the
western portion of the land of Hendrick Jansen, the tailor,
in the Smits Vly, and of the house built by the latter thereon,
about the years 1641-42, and which he had sold to Willem
Adriaensen. This property contained about two hundred feet
frontage along the river, and was something over that dis-
tance in depth, so that it comprised about an acre of ground ;
its rear portion was occupied by the orchard which Hendrick
Jansen had planted, which extended back as far as the slopes
of Jan Damen's hillside pasture, known as the Claaver
Weytie, or the Clover Field. ^

Not being a man of family at this time, it is possible that
Heermans did not as yet occupy the place in Smits Vly
himself, though, like many others in the settlement, he may
have had a slave establishment. ^ Heermans was, in fact, a
man of more than forty years of age wlien, in December,
1650, he married Janneken Verlett, of Utrecht in the Nether-
lands ; she is supposed to have been the daughter of Nicolaes

* See ante, page 152.

2 The Claixver Weytie extended about to the present William Street
westerly. As for the laud of Heermans here, it was bisected by the present
Pine (then called Tienhoven or King's Street) many years after our survey, —
about in the year 1G89.

8 A well-known negro about the town known as Jan Augustinus, or " Augus-
tyn's John," may quite possibly have been a freedman of Augustyu Heermans.



286 NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS PEOPLE

Verlett, a widower, who afterwards married Madame Anna
Bayard, Director Stuyvesant's widowed sister.

After his marriage, Augustyn Heermans' residence was
undoubtedly at the house in the Smits Vly; in the course
of the next few years he seems to have built a larger house
upon the west side of the original one; and the two build-
ings are shown, standing gable end to the road in the Seutter
View; they would appear to have stood a short distance
back from the highway. What Heermans calls his "great
house " must have occupied a good portion of the site of the
present warehouse, No. 175 Pearl Street, while the older
structure stood partly upon the site of the building. No. 177,
and partly upon that of No. 179.

Here Augustyn Heermans spent the last ten or twelve
years of his residence in New Amsterdam. Fronted by the
shingly beach of the East River, and backed by its orchard