The Story of the City of New York ...
by Charles Burr Todd (9781458982223)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: WOUTER VAN TWILLER. The directors, after much laying of their heads together, and canvassing of numerous candidates in their great oak-panelled chamber in Amsterdam, fixed on Wouter Van Twiller as Minuit's successor. " Wouter Van Twiller,"?the name provokes a smile as one recalls the famous description by Knickerbocker: " He was exactly five feet six inches in height, and six feet five inches in circumference. His head was a perfect sphere, and of such stupendous dimensions that Dame Nature, with all her sex's ingenuity, would have been puzzled to construct a neck capable of supporting it; wherefore she wisely declined the attempt, and settled it firmly on the top of his backbone just between the shoulders. His body was oblong and particularly capacious at bottom. His legs were short but sturdy in proportion to the weight they had to sustain; so that when erect he had not a little the appearance of a beer-barrel on skids." A grotesque figure truly, and not all caricature, for Van Twiller was stout of body and slow ofthought; in habit something of a roysterer, with a burgomaster's fondness for good dinners and good wine, and withal of a petty spirit and narrow mind? a man totally unfitted for the place. He had been a clerk in the employ of the West India Company, we are told, and had been appointed at the instance of the powerful patroon and director, Kilian Van Rensselaer, whose niece he had married, and whose interests he might be trusted to look after, which seems all the more queer when we consider that the chief grievance against Minuit was that he had favored the patroons at the expense of the company. Van Twiller arrived early in April, 1633. As he came ashore, he saw between two and three hundred men and women with stolid Dutch faces, the men clad in wid...

USD $20.49

   Dispatch: Immediate - In Stock