Review
“If you’ve been waiting for centuries for a full translation of Adriaen van der Donck’s 1655 work A Description of New Netherland, your wait is over. In this work, edited by Charles T. Gehring and William A. Starna, one of the colony’s most astute observers ruminates on flora and fauna (his six-foot-long lobster sounds like the subject of a proverbial fish story), including meditations on “the amazing ways” of beavers and sightings of beached whales near Albany. . . . [Van der Donck] paints a generally positive picture of American Indians. His informative book is surprisingly accessible.”—Sam Roberts, New York Times.
(Sam Roberts
New York Times 20090528)
"With this new edition, translator Diederik Goedhuys and editors Charles Gehring and William Starna look to elevate Van der Donck''s Description to its rightful place in the canon of early American historical texts. . . . This lively translation is a much-needed teachable primary source for studying both New Netherland and its Indian neighbors."—Andrew Lipman, New York History
(Andrew Lipman
New York History )
"This new edition and original translation of a tract by Dutch settler and lawyer van der Donck makes more widely accessible a document crucial for understanding the history of Dutch colonization in North America. . . . This document is an important primary source for students and researchers in colonial Dutch history, the settlement of New York and North America more generally, and the understanding of Indian cultures in the Northeast."—J. Mercantini, CHOICE
(J. Mercantini
CHOICE )
"Long underutilized, this edition will place A Description of New Netherland alongside Thomas Harriot''s A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, John Smith''s A Description of New England, and William Wood''s New England''s Prospect as essential primary-source narratives of the early days of the New World."—Wendy Lewis Castro, Southwest Journal of Cultures
(Wendy Lewis Castro
Southwest Journal of Cultures )
"The sources on this geographical area in the Dutch period are sparse, so that the addition of this superb translation of van der Donck is of high importance to scholars."—Barbara Alice Mann, Anthropos
(Barbara Alice Mann
Anthropos )
About the Author
Charles T. Gehring is the director of the New Netherland Project with the New York State Library and the coeditor of numerous collections of original documents from Dutch New Netherland. William A. Starna is a professor emeritus of anthropology at the State University of New York College at Oneonta and a coeditor of Iroquois Journey: An Anthropologist Remembers (Nebraska 2007). Gehring and Starna coedited A Journey into Mohawk and Oneida Country, 1634–1635: The Journal of Harmen Meyndertsz van den Bogaert and (with Dean R. Snow) In Mohawk Country: Early Narratives of a Native People.
Diederik Willem Goedhuys is a native of the Netherlands and thirty year resident of South Africa. In addition to having knowledge of Dutch, Afrikaans, and English at his disposal, he also spent several months at the New Netherland Project in Albany, New York, where he had access to the best reference sources for the translation of a seventeenth-century publication.
