As Faire a River is a collection of prose, poetry, imagery, artifacts that replicates the spirit of an era: Dutch New Netherlands in the 17th Century. The focus is primarily on the years 1609 when Henry Hudson sailed into the harbor, the entrance to the great river that now bears his name, to September 8, 1664, when Richard Nicolls captained four British warships into that same harbor to demand capitulation of the Dutch colony to British rule. The colonists, wearied by wars with the Native Americans and skirmishes over boundary issues, refused to fight, a peaceful takeover preferable to more loss of home or life. New Amsterdam became New York, a gift from King Charles II to his brother James, Duke of York, for whom the town’s name was changed. 

Combing then editing period writings—journals, letters, church and court records, ships’ logs and passenger lists, estate inventories—I discovered  that though most documents were written as prose, I often heard poetry, hauntingly lyric, which I lineated into poetic forms. Where the details of a named person were scant or nonexistent, I tried to imagine their thoughts and actions, thus integrating my own words into their histories. I am Dutch and a New Yorker. These people, this historical period are my roots. 

The facts of the colony and its development in As Faire a River are accurate—as accurate as history tells us. Most of the characters and events are factual. The court records, letters, excerpts from Adriaen van der Donck and Petrus Stuyvesant’s writings are in their words of record. The same is true for selections from writings of others in this polyglot society of politicians, traders, travelers, settlers, religious figures—men, women and children. (18 languages were spoken in the 1650s in New Amsterdam alone!) Both awake and in my dreams, I enter their world, appreciate their customs, empathize with their thinking and (humbly) have taken on colonists’ and Native American voices, where there were no extant examples. My own journey into this history has been surprising, enlightening and deeply reverential.