Charles T. Gehring,
Historian and Translator
of New York Colonial Dutch Documents

By Scott Christianson
Hudson Valley Magazine, November 2003

Charles T. Gehring

Tales of New York’s colonial Dutch history keep coming to life thanks to the methodical and persistent efforts of a man who looks like he stepped out of a Rip Van Winkle story himself. Stocky and barrel-chested, with a face reminiscent of a burgher painted by a 17th-century master, Charles T. Gehring has labored for more than 30 years to decipher and translate the state’s 12,000 folios of Dutch colonial records — an immense body of clues left behind by record keepers of the vibrant but lost world known as New Netherland.

For Gehring, those records are rich in information about life at that time, as well as some colorful characters. For example, on March 29, 1647, Antony de Hooghes, the secretary of the patroonship of Rensselaerswijck, dipped his quill into black ink and scrawled in his memorandum book about the sighting of a huge white fish, spouting like a whale, that appeared in the waters of the Hudson near Fort Orange (now Albany). “Only God knows what it means,” he wrote. “On the same evening this fish appeared before us, we had the first thunder and lightning of the year.”

Perhaps this story was passed down through the generations to spark the imagination of one of de Hooghes’ descendants, Herman Melville. “It’s pure speculation,” says Gehring, ‘just putting certain things together.” Gehring, 58, is one of only a handful of modern scholars able to translate 17th-century Dutch. The language itself is formidable, as different from modern Dutch as contemporary American speech is from Shakespearean English. And the handwriting in the folios is also a stumbling block. “Even some people who can read the Dutch can’t decipher it,” says Gehring. “It’s a secretarial hand, a certain uniform style. You have to get used to it, making adjustments in your head when you’re reading, because something that looks like one letter might, in a given context, actually be another.”

Some pages in the records contain Indian signs, totems, or sketches of people and objects long since gone, but most bear only a crowded jumble of lines and shapes. To make sense of it requires dogged, exacting effort, and to understand its full meaning in the context of its day and ours takes a special kind of brilliance.

A master linguist, Gehring, who is of German and Italian heritage, has studied Old Icelandic, Gothic, Old High German, Middle High German, Danish, Dutch, Swedish, Afrikaans, Sanskrit, Greek, Italian, Latin, French, Old English, Middle English, Hittite, Hebrew, and Low Sorbian, among other languages, and his knowledge of New Netherland history is without peer. Over the years, his work, known as the New Netherland Project, has grown in stature, earning him a prized medal from the queen of Holland and the admiration of scholars.

Dutch rule in New York was short lived. Not long after Henry Hudson sailed upriver in 1609, the Dutch established outposts, dotting their maps with names such as Langhe Eylant, Breuckelen, Haerlem, and Kats Kill — in all a sprawling province called New Netherland that covered all or part of the present states of New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. New Amsterdam (now New York City) fell into British bands in 1664; the Dutch won it back, and then lost it again in 1674. Gradually, the use of the Dutch language faded and families took on English and then American ways, although the feudal patroon system survived for another 165 years.

At its height, the province’s population grew to 9,000, and included displaced persons from diverse nations and cultures, including Walloons, Jews, and Africans. “Unlike the English or the French, who were very particular about immigrants, the Dutch brought people from all over, so you had a multicultural population very early on,” notes Gehring. Few traces of Holland’s brief hold on New York remain: the street layout of lower Manhattan, stone houses and Dutch barns scattered throughout the Valley. (Coleslaw, bowling, golf, and Santa Claus are other legacies.) ‘Their biggest presence,” Gehring says, “is in the people who’ve lived most of their lives in this region.... The Dutch made it possible for people to climb the social ladder, where in the English colonies there were social restrictions.” Gehring, admitting that he’s being a little subjective, also believes the Dutch influence left us “much more sociable We’re different from the New Englanders. We have a different sense of sociability.”

It was the Dutch West India Company that maintained the colony, and its employees kept most of the records. Many of these documents were first stored in Manhattan. During the American Revolution, British officers carted some onto two British prison ships to save them from the great fires then ravaging the city. After the Revolution, some of the papers were taken to Albany.

In the early 20th century, the Dutch émigré AJ.F. van Laer spent years making some excellent translations. In 1911, however, a fire raged through the capitol (where the state library was then housed), consuming more than two million documents, including many priceless colonial records. Frantic to stop his life’s work from going up in flames, van Laer repeatedly raced into the inferno and finally had to be doused with a fireman’s hose to keep him from igniting. Van Laer saved many documents, and afterward tried to piece together the damaged remnants, but until Gehring began his work, no further serious translations were made.

Gehring had learned some local Dutch history while growing up in Fort Plain, in the Mohawk Valley. Then, while studying for his doctorate in German linguistics at Indiana University in the late 1960s, he wrote his dissertation on “New York Dutch: A Study of a Language in Decline,” and in the process began to teach himself to read the peculiar Dutch script.

By 1973, after six years of teaching at the University at Albany, he was looking for a new job. As it happened, Ralph De Groff, a descendant of the New York Dutch and a trustee of the Holland Society of New York, wanted to resume van Laer’s translation project. De Groff went to his friend, Nelson Rockefeller, who in turn asked Governor Malcolm Wilson for funding. This resulted in a one-year grant of $20,000.

Gehring was hired in September 1974, and the New Netherland Project was born. Despite an occasional lack of support, has kept the project going ever since and has now translated about half the collection. Although he thoroughly enjoys the work, Gehring says he never would have sought it out, “I never wanted to be a translator. In fact, I still don’t like translating modern language, but this work is a combination of linguistics and history. It requires a kit of understanding of the history of the Dutch and a deep understanding of the history of the Hudson Valley. So it became something I grew into.”

For the last 20 years, Gehring’s primary assistant has been Janny Venema, who recently earned her doctorate from the Free University in Amsterdam and has authored a new book, Beverwyck; A Dutch Village on the American Frontier 1652-1664. Gehring himself continues to turn out books, monographs, articles, and lectures on the subject of the colonial Dutch. One of his publications, which he authored with William A. Starna, was A Journey into Mohawk amd Oneida County, 1634-1635, the translation of a fascinating first-hand account of a 22-year old Dutchman’s desperate mission into Indian country to save the fur trade.

The diarist, Harmen Meyndertsa van den Bogaert, went on to become a prominent privateer and commissary in Manhattan — until the fall of 1647, when he was accused of sodomy, an offense punishable by drowning. After escaping and fleeing into the wilderness, van den Bogaert was recaptured and imprisoned at Fort Orange. As the authorities were awaiting the thaw to take him back to Manhattan for execution, he escaped across the frozen Hudson only to have it give way. He disappeared beneath the ice.

In 1984, Gehring was introduced to author William Kennedy, who listened, spellbound, as the translator recounted the story of van den Bogaert. Kennedy jotted it down in his notepad. Four years later, he published his historical novel, Quinn's Book, which begins with an account of the drowning of a miscreant courtesan, Magdalena Colon, who perished in the icy Hudson. History preserved in the Dutch records had helped to inspire another literary classic.

The Dutch Paper Chase
Some of the story of New York's first European settlers exists in thousands of old documents.

New Netherland Project Home Page
The New Netherland Project was established under the sponsorship of the New York State Library and the Holland Society of New York. Its primary objective is to complete the transcription, translation, and publication of all Dutch documents in New York repositories relating to the seventeenth - century colony of New Netherland. This unique resource has already proven invaluable to scholars in a wide variety of disciplines. It also serves to heighten the general awareness of the major Dutch contributions to America over the centuries and the strong connections between the two nations.