All the World’s a Stage: The Life and Poems of Jacob Steendam, Seventeenth-Century Dutch Traveler

Jacob Steendam was exactly the sort of person that historians call “neglected.” A poor immigrant with some sort of handicap in his legs and feet, he had occasional material success but mostly remained on the fringes of Dutch society, working in lowly positions his entire career. He never led men in battle, never served as governor or mayor, never served on any colonial council. Yet most students of New Netherland have at least heard his name because he wrote and published poetry, including a few poems about the colony that was his home for ten years. Between 1652 and 1662 Steendam lived on the Hudson River, bought and sold property, dabbled in the tobacco and slave trades, and once shared his poetical talents, such as they were, in a pamphlet aimed at potential immigrants. 

In this paper I will examine Steendam’s New Netherland poems in light of his other writings and experiences around the world. Over the course of his life he traveled from Europe to Africa to America to Asia, where he finally died sometime in the 1670s. Everywhere he went he recorded his impressions, not in prose, but in verse. Indeed, his better-known American writings are few in comparison to the rest of his work: three entire volumes on Africa, one on Asia. Regardless of their aesthetic, artistic quality, these books provide both opportunity and challenge—the opportunity to learn the common man’s view of the early Dutch empire, the challenge of using a source that historians typically don’t use. How do I reconstruct a life told mostly in verse? Do I approach poems differently than I do other sources?