Adriaen van der Donck

Who was Adriaen van der Donck?

Adriaen Cornelissen van der Donck was a lawyer and landowner in New Netherland after whose honorific Jonkheer the city of Yonkers, New York is named. In addition to being the first lawyer in the Dutch colony, he was a leader in the political life of New Amsterdam, and an activist for Dutch-style republican government in the Dutch West India Company-run trading post.

Enchanted by his new homeland of New Netherland, van der Donck made detailed accounts of the land, vegetation, animals, waterways, topography, and climate. Van der Donck used this knowledge to actively promote immigration to the colony, publishing several tracts, including his influential Description of New Netherland. Charles Gehring, Director of the New Netherland Institute, has called it "the fullest account of the province, its geography, the Indians who inhabited it, and its prospects...It has been said that had it not been written in Dutch, it would have gone down as one of the great works of American colonial literature."

Van der Donck is a central figure in Russell Shorto's The Island at the Center of the World, which argues, based on newly translated records from the colony, that he was a great early American patriot, forgotten by history because of the eventual English conquest of New Netherland.