This post is by Ted O’Reilly, Curator & Head of the Manuscript Department
Nearly four hundred years ago, in the winter of 1648, a man named Harmen Meyndertsz van den Bogaert drowned in the frigid Hudson River. Bogaert had fallen through the ice while pursued by soldiers from Albany’s Fort Orange. He had arrived in the New World in 1630 and made a name for himself fifteen years before his premature death through a perilous excursion on behalf of the Dutch into Indian territory to re-establish fur trading with the Iroquois nations. His journal, held by the Huntington Library, offers unique insight onto Mohawk practices and established him as an importance chronicler of his era.
Further details of Bogaert’s remarkable life are recounted elsewhere, but a record of his demise survives in the collections of the New-York Historical Society. Among a small collection of letters by successful New Netherlands merchant Govert Loockermans are two, from late 1647 and early 1648, in which Loockermans gives his uncle and business partner news of Bogaert’s fate.
According to the histories, that autumn Bogaert, married with four children and commissary at Fort Orange, had been discovered engaged in a sexual act with his slave Tobias. (In contrast to most accounts though, Loockermans actually names a second paramour whose fate is never revealed.) A recent translation of the letter by the New Netherlands Institute reads thus:
Master Herman, who was at Fort Orange as merchant for the Companie, has had to do with his black boy and with another boy, Swist Jan (Smits Jan?), and they have run off to the savages, but the boy has been captured.
Since Dutch law regarded sodomy as a crime punishable by death, Bogaert fled with Tobias to the safety of the Mohawks. As Loockermans notes, Tobias was captured before long, and eventually Bogaert. Still aware of the punishment he faced in Dutch custody, Bogaert made a second escape attempt during which met his tragic fate. In a subsequent letter Loockermans adds a brief update:
Mr. [Harmen] has gotten himself stuck under the ice and drowned himself near Fort Oranje, as people were chasing him to take him prisoner. In the end he did meet a bad fate.
Bogaert’s was a dramatic end to a promising career and surely there is far more to his story than any of the surviving sources can ever hope to establish. Nonetheless, while Pride Month is largely a celebration of achievements since the Stonewall Riots of 1969, Bogaert’s story reminds us that LGBT history is very much a part of American history from its earliest period.
For a translation of Bogaert’s journal see A Journey into Mohawk and Oneida Country, 1634-1625: The Journal of Harmen Meyndertsz van den Bogaert (Syracuse University Press, rev. ed. 2013)
[This post was updated on June 2, 2020]
Could you tell me what file this document is from?
Hi Barbara,
The Loockermans correspondence make up a small portion (Series XXII) of the Stuyvesant-Rutherfurd Papers. The New Netherlands Institute produced their own transcription and translation within the last few years, including photos that they took, in case you’d like to access the full content.
Ted
Harmen was my 9th great grandfather. As a gay man, I am fascinated to read his story, and honored to be descended from him.
Richard Kilmer rrkilmer@wisc.efu
Richard, I am doing some genealogy research on his ancestry and am fascinated by his extraordinary story. I am curious how you went back so far in your ancestry? I have not been able to find much.
Harmen is my 8th great grandfather. I was able to trace myself back 13 generations through direct lineage to him.
As I was reading the journal for a Masters class in American Indian History that I’m taking now, the sodomy charge was mentioned briefly. And as I read this post, I came to the same conclusion, which was that this was another victim of homophobia, running afoul of laws that promoted cis-hetero society at the expense of many human beings.
Then it hit me that I would never, ever celebrate a sexual relationship between a white male master and a female slave. It is, anyway you look at it, rape and not consensual. I certainly do not put this out there to offend you, Mr. O’Reilly or Mr. Kilmer. This is a genuine question – how do we know that this was consensual, given the power differential between master and slave
Alan, I agree. Not only did he sodomize a slave, the slave was a child.
Power dynamics remain relevant, but I wonder if “Boy” is more a statement of that power dynamic rather than Tobias being an actual child? It was not terribly uncommon to refer to enslaved adults as boy, or children elsewhere in the Americas, not sure about New Amsterdam.
The only times the colonial government prosecuted men for sodomy were when there was an underage victim (it happened twice). I don’t know whether this suggests that Tobias was actually a child, but it may suggest that the power differential inspired them to act.
The Dutch government had a habit of looking the other way for affairs between consenting adults. Of course there could be other reasons Harmen was singled out: he might have been less discreet and he was a very prominent citizen. Perhaps Rensselaerwyck was too small to allow their affair to go unnoticed.
I think it is interesting that Tobias ran away with him, but of course there are plausible explanations for this even if he were not fully consenting to the relationship. There is a lot we will never know.
There are some remarkable takeaways regardless. The Mohawk Indians likely sheltered him. This could reflect the “two spirit” belief and attitudes among native Americans at the time (before colonialism imposed their values). Interestingly, the colonial enforcers sent out to catch Harmen burned several Mowhawk store houses while apprehending him.
The owners subsequently sued in colonial courts for restitution and won. That fact has stayed with me ever since I read it in Russell Shorto’s book a decade ago. I think it speaks to the fact that 17th century native Americans were far more bright and sophisticated than we give them credit for. The fact that the court granted them the money makes me proud for my city (and my profession).
It’s obviously shameful that simply being gay was illegal, but this was a time when Massachusetts was burning people for being witches. In 1620 some of my ancestors fled the Plymouth colony for New Amsterdam. Among other things, he was seeking the more liberal laws of the Dutch colonial government. I owe my very existence to our relative progressiveness, so I am obviously quite biased in favor of finding evidence of it.
I’ve had my own questions about the sketchy story of Harmen vd Bogeart. For starters, the sodomy charge seems just a bit too convenient for those waiting in the wings to take over Harman’s lucrative position, Commissary, a sort of combination treasurer and warehouse manager for the Dutch colony was a prestigious position, coveted by many, and the opportunities for honest profit while so engaged were very good- If one were less than entirely on the up and up one could make even more. As the holder of that position, Harman vdB would have made any number of enemies, and as a man who came to the Dutch colony from Holland alone, he had no family connections in the New World backing him. I’ve had to seriously consider that rivals cooked up the sure-fire sodomy charge as a quick way to oust the Commissary in the absence of any better method.
Then there is the matter of his multiple escapes. The Dutch were not fools nor were they without the standard detention technology of the time: Locks, chains, manacles, stockade cells or dungeon pits, etc. One escape I might believe, but two? Nope, not buying it. I’m of the belief that two things happened here that were not written into the record; First, Harman as likely as not had help escaping. Any important prisoner who escaped once and who could reasonably be expected to be executed for the crime he was charged with would no doubt be secured very well, surely better than the precautions used that were inadequate the first time. Somebody let him go at least the second time, maybe even both; Second, the story about Harman vdB falling through the ice and drowning is plausible, and in the absence of any other account that’s all we have… BUT- If you subscribe to the idea that Harman vdB was let go by friends or sympathetic persons who may have felt that the sodomy charge was baloney, we need to look at the “fell through the ice, body never recovered” story. If I were sympathetic to Harman and let him escape, with the understanding that he needed to leave, never come back and never be heard of again, the story about drowning under the ice would be a great way to close the books and let him get away clean.
My 2 guilders- Love it, hate it, convince me I’m wrong.