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Hillside College - Sometime in the mid-2000s

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It was a midsummer morning. The world was at that midpoint, that tipping point between green and orange, between possibility and death, between starting and finishing. I sat at my desk and stared out  through the open window, fixated on a giant mulberry tree where a million starlings seemed to scream.

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I found myself in the twenty-first century, and, without account, still alive. That was all I had to go on. But given where I (we) had been, it made sense to explore that - to try to unpack those histories that led to here. I had travelled. I had read. I did a Ph.D. I met people and listened. I lived, sometimes recklessly, to find out. Then I settled into writing and teaching and through that sought to give life to those histories not recorded in the public record and muted by the powerful. I sought to bear witness to the stories of people whom the world had silenced, to share stories often erased yet reborn in unseen artifacts and through the play of fact and fantasy. I had found dream and desire, suffering and pain, and anger and love, knowledge and misunderstanding, all framed by immutable nature, wherever I went in place and time. I spent the balance of the 1990s travelling more and reading more and teaching here and there. I ended up at Hillside, sharing the history I was learning…

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I became interested in the story of William Van Arsdale and Ingrid Marie Elstar. As a grad student, I had been asked to write a chapter for a colonial history booklet on Communipaw, an early Dutch settlement on the western shore of the Hudson River, across from the bustling trading post of New Amsterdam. After I found the Gazette legend article and learned that William and Elstar had a connection to Communipaw, their two lives, in a way, attached to mine, and I couldn’t stop thinking about them.  William Van Arsdale and Ingrid Marie Elstar. I was also drawn to their story in part because the original European settlers of Rose Hill disembarked from their ships at Communipaw, and it was also where William and Elstar disembarked and embarked, came and went. In the mid and late-1600s, it was a riotous place, with a tavern and inn where rum-soaked Europeans, Native Americans, Africans, and others from the global regions of the vast Dutch trade empire, cavorted and mixed. This was all somehow familiar: the hybrid cultures that engrossed and enchanted me in the Caribbean basin to where I often travelled and felt at home. The places where difference – beautiful, meaningful difference – abounds, cultivated in a terrible colonial history, a forced mixing and mingling, painfully birthing the exquisite wonder of post-colonial worlds ruminated here.

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Much of Communipaw was swampland. The few human structures were built on silt and rock islands, which arose here and there amongst the creeks and ponds that fed the morass after scurrying down the Palisades, the basalt ridge that slid upward, northward from just west of Communipaw and ended in steep cliffs - their ancient lava rock staring down the formidable, compressed schist across the river. The wetlands surrounding the sparse settlement were home to thousands of migrating birds whose colorful poses, preenings, and songs entertained the endlessly migratory sailors and soldiers who passed through Communipaw. The Native people considered it sacred ground. It gave them their sustenance - their oysters and cod - but they also found it magical because of the glowing, sparkling, mysterious fog that hovered over the marshland at sunrise and sunset. They believed the stories passed down by their ancestors who told of the dead coming back to life within the dazzling fog that held the myths and legends and all accounts of the past and future. 

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The water flowed into and circled around and stayed in pools and left and came with the ebb and flow of the harbor’s tide, lifting and lowering the ships bearing conquest and ruin. The water connected Communipaw to the world beyond and also, against the flow of a meandering creek, to a place on the palisade heights governed by a need for safety and stasis against the inexorable flux and flow. The essential, natural processes of change gave way inland to change wrought by people seeking to cut, kill, displace, own, and ruin and from which there was no way back to the natural realm of life’s synced cycles of loss and renewal. Later, the place was called “the first permanent settlement,” by people terrified of  impermanence. 

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There, on the high ground west of Communipaw, between  the North or Hudson River to the east and the Hackensack River to the west, the Dutch built, exploiting enslaved or indentured labor, a village to last as it rotted from within, and named it “Bergen.” Replete with a stockade fencing, Bergen, with its linear, planned streets and lots and central square with a well, grazing ground, school, public stock, and church was designed to keep “undesirables” (a term used later by the descendents of the European colonizers to identify whom they were not and keep them out) at bay. The Europeans had repeatedly skirmished with the Lenni Lenape, including two “wars,” down by the North River, rendering their early settlements there temporary, except for Communipaw, which was not regarded as a permanent settlement and which was home to transients but has lasted a long, long time. Bergen, then, became a spot where the grappling hook thrown by empire seeking Europeans took hold, spelling doom for the rolling, green vista to the west where forests would be cut down, plowed and paved over, and greed seeds planted, yielding an insatiable, recklessly harvested, consumer crop. 

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William and Elstar found each other in the confines of Bergen and knew and lost love. Their story, culled from found fragments, became like all the knowledge I had accumulated and which I felt compelled to share with my students and just to share, too.

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The colonial records of New Netherlands, New Amsterdam, New York, and Bergen, which documented the lives of owners and criminals, revealed little about William and Elstar, so I filled in the details. I had “The Legend of Elstar and William Van Arsdale” article, which had been published in the Albany Gazette after it had been found amongst the rubble of “Chipotle 16” - the name given because it was the sixteenth gun massacre to mar that chain during the unraveling. From that, I scoured various extant legal documents and found the following sources:

1. A Dutch colonial court record from 1691 stating that Ingrid Marie Elstar was sentenced to a flogging and pillory in Bergen for spying for the savages.

2. A ship’s manifest listing an “Ingrid Marie Elstar” as the property of Otto Bruns, the captain of a ship, the Volle Maan, that sailed from New York for Barbados on June 20, 1691.

3. A deed transfer dated June 21, 1691, and showing the sale of a small plot of land by William Van Arsdale to a “Johann Bruns.”

4. A list of missing persons after the great earthquake of 1692 in the English colony of Port Royal, Jamaica with no mention of Bruns, Elstar, or William.

This wasn’t too much to work with, but over time, I filled in the rest. I conceived a love story because in all times, people fall in love. And throughout history, suffering and longing abound, and so does survival. Nature - within and without - is the setting for their and all stories. As much as millions have tried to subdue, conquer, ignore, deny, or submit to the inexorable truth that humans are part of nature and determined by it, they were and remain of it and determined by it, entangled in plots driven by this setting.

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William and Elstar had first met when they both worked for the Newkirks, one of the first Dutch families to settle on the stolen land. Something clicked between them. William was outgoing, friendly, and endlessly helpful. Elstar was reserved and thoughtful, fulfilling her duties quietly and without complaint. He was white; she was dark and of mysterious origins. She was not exotic to William; she was just Elstar, who had been found as an infant left on the banks of the Hackensack River by the Lenape and raised by their village. They both possessed a timeless, youthful beauty. It seemed impossible to imagine them old. European men outnumbered European women in colonial North America, and it was not unusual for the men to couple with Native or African women, often violently, but not marry them. Knowing this, and knowing that what they shared was more than an affair, that they only wanted each other, Elstar and William kept their growing love a secret in Bergen.

There was a place, though, well outside the village of Bergen, upstream along one of the waterways that fed the Hackensack River, called “Pascack” by the Native people. The Africans in Communipaw and the Ramapo Lenape spoke of a “magical woods.” The gurgling, rock-strewn water there meandered past a hidden clearing in the trees. In that place, William and Elstar and their love was safe from the heartless, indifferent world of people who were to brutally scorn and abuse Elstar, who hated themselves for desiring what the young couple knew, and who would never accept Elstar and William’s marriage. And in that sunlit sanctuary up a rise from the water and into the woods, in the shadow of an ancient boulder, they freely made their own sacred vows and consummated their timeless love that the people of the world rejected.

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From the Bergen Square incident alluded to in the “Legend” article, I understood that the little colonial village founded in 1660 had gone from sanctuary to hell for Elstar. The proud, steadfastly religious, Dutch, white settlers, backed by a global corporation, had stockaded themselves on the high ground, on Indian maze fields in an early act of European-style insularity.  The tolerance of others that may have twinkled occasionally from the other side of the river like oil lamps at night did not flicker at all in Bergen where the good fathers and mothers liked sameness, however bland it tasted. It really didn’t matter why Elstar was out and about in the Square at night. She was there; she could be seen. And this threatened a perceived holiness of uniformity. She threatened the shaky concrete foundations upon which people, not just in Bergen, but invading throughout the continent, fearfully tried to know themselves but only ended up terrorized by what they were not. Elstar threatened them further – the men and women – with her beauty, a desirable exotic in their eyes and minds, and this made her dangerous. Secret longings, imprisoned in denial, surfaced as hate and anger directed toward her.

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The abuse started after Elstar was already loving William, and she kept it all from him. First it was soldiers, actually German mercenaries hired by the Dutch West India Company, which sustained its business interests in North America well beyond the English takeover of New Netherlands in 1664 and which maintained a private, corporate militia as companies did back then before government armies started working for them. Elstar had planted a small grove of daffodils in a corner of Bergen Square, and she liked to tend to them on moonlit nights when she could reclaim some time after working all day from sunrise well into the evening. The soldiers had been drinking down in Communipaw since the morning, and they had been told by a Portuguese sailor who was just back from Curacao that the most beautiful woman in all of the Americas lived in a village built beyond the cliffs that slid up from Communipaw to the northwest. The drunken, armed Germans forced an aging, withered Lenape man to show them the way, and they stumbled with him along a trail that would later be a road for automobiles up the cliffs and over to Bergen where the nightguard confidently let them pass into Bergen Square, where they found Elstar sitting in her garden and studying a yellow daffodil flower, cupped in her hand and glowing radiantly in the moonlight. The soldiers dragged her off to an outbuilding adjacent to a small house built by the people enslaved by Gerrit Gerritson, a pious Dutch colonizer, on Academy Street, just down the street from the  school where Elstar fed the colonizers’ children and behind the parson's house. They raped her repeatedly and left her crying on the thresh floor. In the early morning hours, she painfully collected herself to face a day, during which she pretended nothing had happened so that she could see William smile. She needed him to be happy, not to know or try to understand what she was going through because she feared that if she shared her horror with him, their shared dream light might be extinguished. When the sun came up, its low light rays illuminating the mysterious dawn mist, the wreckage of a rowboat settled in the marshy shore waters of Communipaw amidst the mutilated, bloody bodies of the German mercenaries. And as the earth’s rising star’s light poured into the Pascack Valley, Oratam, the Hackensack Lenape chief, greeted a returning, stoic band of warriors who brought their tribute of seized firesticks and armor. 

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The elders of Bergen hated themselves for knowing and excusing the “unpleasant” truth of Elstar’s rape, and seeing her enraged them. But they were grateful that their white wives, whom they did not desire, were safe from the violence the Native and African women were forced to endure. And the Dutchmen, harder, colder, and meaner toward the women, notably Elstar, whom they did desire, decreed that no one who was not a white Christian was allowed in the Square past sunset.

The parson at the Dutch Reformed Church, not a minister - he was only filling in until the Dutch West India Company directors in Amsterdam could find a suitably ordained replacement - feigned horror over the rumors about Elstar and the soldiers and decided that he would keep a close eye on her, ostensibly to keep her safe but really because her proximity fed his sordid, profoundly repressed fantasies. He gave her a nice room in his house, declaring the servant’s quarters unsafe, but then he came to her at night and forced himself upon her. Soon afterward, Elstar was pulled from her daffodil garden and dragged into the middle of the Square and locked in the pillory. Then she was flogged for spying for the Lenape, a charge made up by the parson who sought to punish her for what he did to her. In the following days, she hid the scars on her back not because she was ashamed but because she didn't want William to find out. She knew that if he knew what the parson had done, or the soldiers, he would want to kill, and that would doom what she believed lay ahead for them. But she'd had enough of Bergen and sought refuge amongst the colorful birds and colorful people of Communipaw.

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English, Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese sailors, whom William and Elstar encountered in the taverns of Communipaw, told stories of a bustling settlement on the south coast of Jamaica, a Caribbean island  seized by Cromwell’s English from the Spanish. It was called Port Royal and lay at the tip of a sandy peninsula that stretched away from the new English city, called “Kingston,” and the larger former Spanish capital city, dubbed by the English, “Spanish Town.” In Port Royal it seemed, it didn’t matter what color skin a person had, what language one spoke, whose god one worshiped, where one had been and what one had done. Anyone could invent themselves there in any way sought. One just needed money. Elstar, who longed to get farther away from the horror visited upon her, wondered about going there. So did William. Neither had the money. Then there was Otto Bruns, who crushed their dream and kept it alive.

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William was reluctant to approach the weathered, mysterious captain who sat at his corner table in the corner of Bout’s dimly lit tavern, always accompanied by his giant, rainbow colored parrot and a dutiful, strange little man who often flapped his arms like wings if a stranger approached. In the scattering of ramshackle inns on the marshy shores and islands in the morass of Communipaw, people from around the world crossed paths, sometimes furiously, sometimes quietly. But no one crossed Bruns’s path unless it was for a reason. His reputation was known throughout the global trading empire of the Dutch East and West India companies. He was to be left alone.

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Otto Bruns had set off as a young man from Rotterdam, intent on making his fortune and settling down back home in the Netherlands with his beautiful, young betrothed. He was a gifted sailor who loved the sea, its emptiness and its possibility. He spent many nights on the ship’s watch, under a blanket sparkling with every star, fixed on a horizon, neither close nor distant, and dreaming of a quiet life on the land that he had left with the woman whom he missed and whose image dissolved more and more each night into the face of the moon, new then quarter then full then new and not there again. The creak and roll of the ship, heavy wood straining and groaning with the rise and fall of each wave, settled his restless mind, which weighed too much on the land with its fragile solidity and false permanence.

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The Dutch trade routes were lucrative but dangerous, and ship captains who needed to survive in order to get home to somewhere, someday, were much in demand. Riches came and went, but the unutterable yet immutable loneliness of the vast ocean lasted and was stronger than any survival instinct. The sea, the stars, and the moon, hung with mystery and allure, always there and forever untouchable, out of reach. Bruns sensed he had nothing to lose on the earth and kept sailing toward the ever-elusive horizon, drawn to it because it could never be reached nor left behind. It was where she was waiting for him and why he sailed on. In time, the Dutch West India Company offered Bruns his own ship, which he named the Volle Maan and had a masthead - a giant angel with yellow hair who held the moon in her hands, high above her head. Yellow on blue, rising and falling against the sea and sky.

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It happened on Man O War Bay on the northeast coast of Tobago in the South Caribbean Sea. The Dutch had established a settlement, Nieuw Walcheren, there in 1633, but it didn’t last. The Spanish of Trinidad sacked it and killed the settlers. It was reestablished again and again, by the Dutch, then the Courlanders, then the Spanish, then the English, Dutch, French, Spanish…Later, near the end of the eighteenth century, the English would take it over once and for all and name it Charlotteville. But in the spring of 1675, Otto Bruns and the Volle Maan lay anchored in the bay while shore crews collected food for the screaming, hungry scarlet ibises that filled the ship's lower decks. He had purchased them in New Andalusia from a Mariches tribe living along the Orinoco River where the bright red birds spent their days feeding before returning at night to the mangrove swamps of Trinidad. They sold for a premium, which rose higher the farther north the market. The demand was greatest in Europe because the birds didn’t live long there, unable to adjust to short days and winter and to Europeans. Bruns’s cargo was as valued as a ship load of silver, and the ghost-like, unflagged, white ships that lowered their sails as they glided silently into Man O War Bay were ready to take it. Bruns refused to surrender and the brief battle that ensued destroyed his ship and killed most of his crew. When the last exploding cannon fire burst through the hull of the Volle Maan, a great cloud of red birds filled the air and hovered in the sky, confusing the attackers, who could no longer see the horizon and floundered on the rocks of Pirates Bay. They also missed the angel that carried the moon and a badly wounded Bruns to the shore.

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As he lay on his back recovering, having been taken in by a band of maroons who fled bondage when their former owner had been killed in the colonial wars and who lived in the steep hills that rose to the southwest of the quiet settlement on the bay, he made his plans. His wound, which had castrated him and left him sexless, healed slowly, nursed by the polyrhythmic sounds of the tamboo music throughout each night. Previously barred from playing music by their enslavers, the maroon people of the steep hills coaxed melodies from bamboo and conducted choruses of lizards crying in the blackness, encircling Bruns’s distress and saving his life. He would sail again through the black night over the blue water toward horizons interred in memory, past the line between the sea and sky consumed by gunpowder and greed.

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One morning, a large rainbow colored parrot flew through the open window of Bruns’s room, perched atop his bedpost, and started squawking, “What’s my name, what’s my name?!” Bruns replied, “Callie Topaz.” Thereafter, each morning, as the parrot requested, Bruns gave him a new name: “Lazarine Wess,” “Plinakot Hayes,” “Phillipe Undu,” “Telltom,” “Limon Devoy,” “Klepbo Green,” …on and on. The parrot was thrilled with each day’s new sing-song identity. Throughout his travels, Otto Bruns offered, to his parrot friend and others, the magic of reinvention from day to day and place to place.

The maroons of the hills helped him rebuild his ship, and as the masthead was fixed to the reincarnated Volle Maan, they loaded the molasses they had amassed from harvesting their sugar cane from their hidden valley fields into the cargo hold, then they got busy on deck as the new crew for the reincarnated ship they had brought back to life. At the last minute, a mysterious woman whom the Spanish had called “Linda” joined the maroons on deck and settled in the bow. Once Bruns set sail, no one or nothing could stop him. English pirate ships with Spanish flags sunk to the bottom in the wake of Captain Bruns and the Volle Maan.  Moroccan marauders and French privateers fell to the depths beneath the blank surface of the sea where dreams endlessly gathered and glided and frothed and slipped and broke and reformed, while Bruns under his hat adorned with big bird feathers of starlight sailed on. The seventeenth century oceans, from the roiling seas of the far east to the placid Caribbean after the tumultuous Atlantic, lured and swallowed countless men and women who set out for something and found blue-green eternity beneath the waves. Bruns sailed on.

 

He sailed to Barbados to sell the maroon’s molasses on the exchange there and then to proceed up the coast of North America after loading a cargo of colorful birds and their mysterious caretaker, Terendike Woo, a small, bald, wrinkled man of unknown origins who spoke only in bird songs that no one could understand but that made everyone feel at ease. He had been first sighted sitting atop a tropical almond tree in Holetown just as the Volle Maan appeared on the horizon. 

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The story of the attack in Man O War Bay preceded Bruns to Bridgetown, the newly established English capital on the south coast of Barbados. The crowd that gathered, as it always did when a new ship arrived in port, fearfully gave way as Bruns disembarked. The English landowners and settlers and their enslaved Africans and Irish indentures, who together outnumbered the English, knew that somehow Bruns and the Volle Maan had survived the attack of six white ships that were now wrecked and strewn across the rocks of Pirates Bay off the coast of Tobago. The lone survivor of the attacking ships, an Indian servant who had been plucked half dead from the Caribbean by a pirate ship whose captain needed someone to prepare his tea, told of a fearless sailor in a feathered hat, who, while clinging to the masthead of his doomed ship, repeatedly aimed and fired his pistol, until he was absorbed by the great cloud of red birds that confused and scattered the attackers. 

Bruns, who spoke dozens of languages but who had few words for anyone, silently rejected the solicitation of companionship from the many women who offered, willingly or not, themselves to sailors seeking the comforts of the island that had once spewed lava as it grew out of the blue sea that rubbed uneasily against the green ocean. These women, as well as everyone else, parted and backed away, as Bruns limped along the promenade wearing his feathered hat. The woman named “Linda” left the ship, slipped into the crowd, and disappeared. Terendike Woo, having migrated down to Bridgetown in time for the Volle Maan’s landing, fearlessly fell in behind Bruns and chirped directions to a quiet, dim inn where they disappeared inside. They remained inseparable over the next few days as business was conducted, the molasses exchanged for a cargo of birds that conversed easily with Woo as he loaded their cages onto the ship.

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On a hot day in late August, they set sail on calm waters that had raged furiously just days before in a powerful hurricane, which had damaged all of the ships in the harbor except the Volle Maan. They sailed in the storm's wake until they reached the warm northward currents, which they would ride all the way up to New York, the name given by the English to New Amsterdam, which Charles II had seized from the Dutch in 1664. But Bruns would not dock in New York. After he and Terendike Woo and the crew of maroons and their cargo of noisy birds skirted the Sandy Hook, they tacked west and lowered anchor near the little village teetering on the marshland that lay at the foot of the old trail the Lenape took from the Hackensack to the North River and which they called Communipaw. It was one place on the land where Bruns felt at ease. He was left alone, which he was everywhere now, and he liked hearing the sounds of the many languages spoken from different parts of the vast Dutch trading empire. And he took some particular, distant comfort in hearing the old Dutch language spoken here, across the harbor from English New York. Communipaw was a refuge for many, like Bruns, who had no homes elsewhere for any number of reasons. He liked this place of difference - different colors, different tongues - where there seemed to be no time for anyone to be or stay the same. And then one night, while sitting in the corner of Bout’s tavern, with his dutiful parrot named “Kleenput” that day, and next to Terendike, who combed the feathers of a North American Cardinal he had befriended in an elm tree, Otto Bruns removed his hat when he was approached by a young couple who needed his help.

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Elstar had met him after she had fled Bergen for the safety of the African community in Communipaw. She had found work at the tavern. William visited her when he could. Every now and then, they got away together to their upstream clearing in the woods. Elstar hadn’t known what to make of Bruns at first. He didn’t approach her like all men did, including William. He made no advances and didn’t look at her with eyes that stopped on her skin or face or breasts or ass. His dark blue eyes looked through her and seemed to reflect the ocean lying somewhere in the distance behind her head. “Can you work? Housekeeping, cook? I sail for Barbados with the next favorable wind.”

Barbados. Not Port Royal.

Bruns saw it in her face. “I have business in Barbados. You’ll be safe. Work for me and someday you’ll  find a place to live where you are free.”

Elstar saw the drunken sailors leering at her. She heard the harsh, foreign taunts of the German soldiers. She remembered the Parson, who said she’d be safe, sweating and heaving over her. She wanted to be free. “I’ll go.”

Horrified and unable to know for himself what Elstar knew about the world, William pleaded, “You can’t go.” 

“We’ll find our place, William. It’s not here. I have to go”

Feeling her urgency and realizing, “You have to. I’ll get there somehow...soon. I’ll settle things here and then look for you.” He couldn’t know why Elstar had to go, could leave him so soon, but if it were that maybe her life depended on it, he had to acquiesce. He fed off her sureness, and he believed Bruns, who only said true things. Elstar could see distant shores - other places and times, and she knew she loved him there, too.

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They renewed their vows at their place in the woods along the Pascack, inscribing a small rock with their initials and the moon and stars under which they knew each other. These trees filled with birds, next to clear running water bathing a rock island and brimming with fish and frogs, away from a world of people who were lost and fearful and who hated themselves and others, offered timeless sanctuary. Though they were to part, for now, this place in the woods would be with them and they would be with it past time itself.

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 William stood along the banks of the harbor fed by the North River and the upland streams and watched Captain Otto Brun’s ship, the Volle Maan, sail away. He last saw Elstar standing on the bow of the ship, her long dark hair in the wind and against the sky, as she rose and fell with the ship and waves

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