The William and Mary Quarterly

Abstract:

The poems exchanged by Dutch West India Company officers Johan Farret and Petrus Stuyvesant—later director general of New Netherland—during their stay on Curaçao call attention to an understudied genre of friendship poetry within the earliest settler literature from the Americas. The poems’ method of collection and distribution differs from the printed verse that has entered the early American canon. Moreover, Stuyvesant and Farret’s occasional and friendship verse celebrated aspects of the Dutch Empire and thus differs from the familial or religious focus of the canonical poetry by early English or German colonists. Stuyvesant and Farret’s poems participated in a flourishing Dutch tradition of civic verse, which was neither courtly nor churchly. The act of writing such friendship poetry was more important than the poems’ contents, and the poems’ gestures of affection display how male affect and friendship networks channeled imperial ambition and advancement within the Dutch Atlantic. And finally, because one poem concerns Stuyvesant’s lost leg, these works offer an interesting contribution to disability studies. Taken as a whole, these verses alert us to how different literary composition looked on the margins of empire when compared with the writings that are now commonly anthologized. Stuyvesant and Farret’s poems are both strikingly Dutch and remarkably Atlantic.