Redraft of the Castello Plan New Amsterdam in 1660
John Wolcott Adams, I.N. Phelps Stokes, Redraft of the Castello Plan New Amsterdam in 1660, 1916. Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, New-York Historical Society.
Teuntje Straatmans was born in Culemborg, the Netherlands, in 1616. She grew up during a prosperous era when the Dutch economy and culture flourished, fueled by the many colonies the Dutch claimed all over the world.
Teuntje first appears in the historical records around 1631, when she and her husband Jan Meijerinck arrived in the Dutch colony in Brazil. Historians do not know what led her to make the difficult journey across the Atlantic. Few Dutch women were eager to leave behind the stability of life in the Netherlands for the challenges in the colonies. Teuntje’s journey might have been prompted by international conflict. Historians suspect that Jan was a soldier for the Dutch West India Company (DWIC). In 1631 the DWIC was at war with Portugal over control of part of the Brazil colony. Based on the date of her arrival, Teuntje may have traveled with Jan as part of a fleet carrying 2,000 soldiers.
Teuntje and Jan settled in Cabadelo, a formerly Portuguese fort on the Brazilian coast near the current-day city of Recife. Adjusting to life in her new home was probably challenging. She was only a teenager, and the tropical climate in Brazil was very different from the cold, rainy weather in the Netherlands. Mortality rates were high due to the spread of tropical diseases, and the continued war with the Portuguese led to many deaths among the soldiers. Teuntje also did not have family to support her as she navigated the challenges of building her life and family. After the death of her first baby in 1637, Teuntje gave birth to a daughter named Margriet in 1639.
Jan died sometime in the 1640s, leaving Teuntje a young widow with a child to support. Like many other widows in the colonies, Teuntje remarried, probably not long after Jan’s death. She married Georg Haff, a German soldier from Augsburg, Bavaria. He worked for the DWIC. Teuntje gave birth to twin sons, Laurens and Pieter, in 1649. Pieter died when he was only a few months old. Georg died only a few years later, leaving Teuntje a widow for the second time.
Under Dutch law, Teuntje was able to retain the rights to her property.
When the Portuguese increased their efforts to retake Brazil in the early 1650s, Teuntje decided it was time to leave Brazil for somewhere safer. She settled on the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe with her third husband, Tieleman Jacobsen. They had a daughter, Anna, around 1654.
Teuntje lived in Guadeloupe for only a year or two. She left the island with her three children for New Amsterdam around 1655. The historical records don’t explain why she left, or why Tieleman did not travel with her. The Caribbean was a hotbed of international conflict, so Teuntje may have been fleeing for safety a second time. Her sister Barentie already lived in New Netherland, which may have made the northern colony attractive. Tieleman may have planned to join the rest of the family at a later date. But he never arrived, and Teuntje had him legally declared dead in New Amsterdam.
Not long after, on June 15, 1657, Teuntje married her fourth husband. Gabriel Corbesij was a soldier from Leuven, in what is now Belgium. He would later become a watchman for the DWIC. Under Dutch law, Teuntje was able to retain the rights to her property. She owned two houses in New Amsterdam. When the family moved to Gabriel’s small farm in Brooklyn, Teuntje rented out her houses.
In New Amsterdam all citizens had access to the court system, which was frequently used to settle disputes between residents of the colony. The records of these courts contain fascinating details about the daily lives of the citizens of New Amsterdam. Teuntje shows up in court records multiple times. In 1660 one of Teuntje’s tenants sued her. The tenant told the court that he agreed to rent one of Teuntje’s homes if she fixed leaks in the building, but the tenant claimed that Teuntje did not make the repairs, forcing him to find other accommodations. In this case Gabriel tried to appear before the court on Teuntje’s behalf, but the court demanded that Teuntje appear herself. The court ruled that the tenant only had to pay part of his rent because she had not fulfilled her duties as a landlady.
There is also evidence that Teuntje was a respected member of her community. Shortly before her death, the religious leader at her church recorded the details of her life, leaving an invaluable record for historians.
Teuntje Straatmans died in Brooklyn on October 19, 1662. Half of her estate went to Gabriel and the other half was split evenly between her three children. Teuntje’s story is an example of migration and mobility in the Dutch colonies, as well as the economic opportunities available to Dutch colonial women.
Vocabulary
- Dutch Republic: The name of the country of the Dutch in Europe from 1581 to 1795.
- Dutch West India Company: The company that owned and ran New Netherland.
- estate: All of the money and property owned by a person.
- New Amsterdam: The capital of the colony of New Netherland, where New York City is today.
- New Netherland: The Dutch colony in North America, which encompassed land between the Connecticut and Delaware Rivers, and up the Hudson River to present-day Albany, New York.
- watchman: A person whose job it is to enforce the law and prevent crime.
Discussion Questions
- Why did Teuntje Straatmans move around the Dutch colonies in the Americas? What does her story reveal about the lives of people in the Atlantic World?
- What specific challenges did Teuntje Straatmans face as a woman?
- What does Teuntje Straatmans’s story reveal about the rights of women in the Dutch colonies?
Suggested Activities
- APUSH Connection: 2.7 Colonial Society and Culture
- Include this life story in a lesson about the colonial Atlantic World. This life story helps students understand the connections between different colonies and how colonists like Teuntje Straatmans moved between them.
- Explore the rights of married women in New Netherland by combining this life story with Life Story: Johanna de Laet and Dutch Interpreter.
- For a larger lesson on the experiences of Dutch women in the colonies, teach this resource alongside any of the following:
- For a larger lesson on the connections and communications between the various colonies during this time, combine this resource with any of the following:
- After reading this life story, ask students to chart Teuntje Straatmans’s journey on a map to reinforce the scale of her journeys across the Atlantic World.
Themes
GEOGRAPHY AND THE ENVIRONMENT; IMMIGRATION, MIGRATION, AND SETTLEMENT
