DUTCH

 

by Willem Meiners

GUEST AND host at the same time. And with good reason. Because this week it is exactly 400 years ago that the very first Dutch immigrants arrived in America from the Netherlands. On board were two young Huguenots, Joris and Katrijn Rapalje. Just before their ship sailed away from Holland, they got themselves married in Amsterdam.

Historians call them America’s Adam and Eve. Katrijn gave birth a year later at Fort Orange, now Albany, to a baby daughter Sarah, the first-ever immigrant baby on American soil. Sarah was later joined by 10 siblings, and they in turn produced 87 grandchildren. There are always smart folks somewhere who can do the math, which is why the unofficial estimate is that this first young immigrant couple alone was at the root of a family tree that yielded more than a million descendants.

Nearly ten thousand Dutch sailed to America that century. They were generally young and in excellent health, for they first went through a mandatory medical before being allowed to make the crossing. They got married, initially among themselves, but soon also to partners of other nationalities, and they brought large families into the world. Dutch women who married foreigners lost their Dutch surnames, but obviously passed on their Dutch DNA with gusto. And so today there are tens of millions of Americans with Dutch and non-Dutchlike names alike walking around carrying a partially Dutch background.

SO WHAT? Well, keep in mind from which Holland the predecessors of all those Dutch Americans hailed. The Netherlands was world champion. With a fleet of 20,000 ships, more than the rest of Europe combined. The Dutch were the best transporters. The best importers. The best exporters. The best dam builders. The best land reclaimers. The best water managers. They dug the best canals. They were the best printers, the best publishers – half the world’s books came from the Netherlands. They had the best freedom of speech, the best freedom of religion, the best open doors for refugees.

They built the best houses, had the best education for their children. They had the best lawyers and the best philosophers, they had the best microscopes and the best telescopes. They had the best and best regulated pharmacies, the greatest advances in medical care. And they were the world’s best painters: in the absence of cameras, Vermeer, Hals, De Hooch, Bol, Steen captured on canvas what Holland’s everyday looked like. Nowhere else did that happen.

TODAY, four hundred years later: paint art became stage art. Hollywood became home to countless top actors with Dutch origins, from Jolie to Theron, from Brando to Eastwood, from De Niro to Fonda, from Cher to Doris Day. Singers: from Elvis to Eddie Vedder, from Crosby to Bruce, from Aguilera to Taylor, from Jimi to Red Hot Chili Pepper Kiedis to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Ronnie, Johnny and Donnie. Printers became writers, from Hemingway to Updike, from Ludlum to Stephen King, from Melville to Twain, from Stephenie Meyer to Walt Whitman, and even the little free libraries on a stick in a hundred thousand front yards were conceived by Todd Bol, a direct descendant of painter Ferdinand Bol.

America’s roads are being built by Vermeer’s yellow fleet from Iowa, with asphalt from Friesland’s Hotze Koch’s grandsons. In New York, Houston, Miami and San Francisco, the Dutch have been hired to reinforce waterfronts and levees. In Los Angeles, Tampa, Seattle and Minneapolis as well, and in New Orleans, Norfolk, Charleston, Memphis and Chicago. The Erie Canal that made New York forever bigger than Boston was the brainchild of DeWitt Clinton, son of Marie de Witt from Dordrecht. And Brooklyn Bridge? Built by Emily Roebling who then wrote a book about where she came from: Dirck van der Vliet and Greetje Gerritse of Nederhemert, aunt Aaltje Schaets of Beesd, grandmother Hester Verveelen of Amsterdam and uncle Moses de Graaf of Middelburg.

Do I need to go on? Two of America’s top-five publishers are Dutch, Elsevier and Wolters Kluwer. Eerdmans and Zondervan dominate America’s religious literature. And Marc Tarpenning, descendant of Gerrit Teerpenning from Bunschoten, invented the e-book.

ALL I’M saying is, there is a reason I started this paper two months ago. America today is covered with footprints, fingerprints and DNA of Holland and the Dutch, more than of any other ethnicity. Edward Bok from Den Helder preceded me. He was the editor-in-chief of the Ladies Home Journal, and 120 years ago he challenged the readers of his magazine, circulation 2 million, “Who is the mother of America?” Answer: “Holland.” It was about time someone picked up his lead.

* Willem Meiners is the editor of The Daily Dutchman. He was editor-in-chief of De Gooi- en Eemlander before emigrating to America in 1991. There he became a book printer, bookseller, book publisher and helicopter pilot. He wrote 20 books, including De Dutch Touch, published by Balans in Amsterdam. He is the husband of Alice Rush, the father of two daughters, and grandfather of two grandchildren.