The Pilgrims' Old World Settlement

By Frances Stead Sellers
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 23, 2000; Page C01

LEIDEN, the Netherlands –– Almost 400 years ago, David Koet's ancestor Moses Fletcher boarded the Mayflower and set sail for the New World. For most of his life, Koet knew nothing about his relative's adventures 12 generations back, but he now believes Fletcher may have been a hero of that historic Atlantic voyage:

In mid-crossing, the wooden vessel was battered by heavy storms. As a blacksmith, Fletcher was one of only two men aboard with the skill to repair a cracked main beam, Koet relates with a grin of pride. He believes it was Fletcher's work that allowed the ship and its 102 now-legendary passengers to sail on.

Like countless other descendants of that first group of Pilgrims to reach America's shores, Koet gathers with family members today to honor his forefather. He begins the day as he has customarily done in recent years--at a Thanksgiving service in Leiden, the city that his family has called home since Fletcher's time.

A Mayflower descendant Koet may be, but from the wooden clogs he wore as a boy to the guttural language that tumbles between smiles from his lips, David Koet is thoroughly Dutch.

Now almost 80, Koet recalls his disbelief some 20 years ago when his niece Joke Wassenaar surprised her relatives with news of their relationship to America's Pilgrim fathers. But according to Jeremy Dupertuis Bangs, an American historian who helped Wassenaar decipher the connection from handwritten documents in 17th-century Dutch, Koet and his niece are far from unique here. Several hundred people from this town of 117,000 are descended from Pilgrim families, Bangs says; some, like Koet, from passengers on that famous first voyage.

Bangs should know. Three years ago, armed with unfailing enthusiasm and techniques he honed in a previous position as curator of Plimoth Plantation's "living history" exhibits in Plymouth, Mass., Bangs opened a one-room Pilgrim museum in a 14th-century house here.

With his determination to rescue the Pilgrims from mere folklore and tell their story through the tools they used and the places where they lived and worked, Bangs has done much to breathe life into the paper cutouts decorating America's Thanksgiving tables. But in doing so, he now finds himself at loggerheads with Dutch officials.

It's a classic clash between cultural preservation and economic development. And it's also a clash between styles, between the rumpled, round-faced 54-year-old American academic, who speaks fluent Dutch and has committed himself to his adopted home's past, and Leiden's lean 34-year-old alderman for cultural affairs, who wears the suit, tie and ambitious expression of a successful bureaucrat and talks in fluent English about the city's need to modernize.

Preserving the Past

The Pilgrims, including many who boarded the Mayflower in September 1620, Bangs explains, had spent the previous 11 years in this medieval Dutch town in a first attempt to find relief from the religious persecution they suffered in England. Some settled permanently. Others, like Fletcher, left wives and children here when they finally struck out for the New World on the Mayflower or subsequent ships, presumably intending to bring their families over once they had established a colony. Plans sometimes changed--for example, almost half of them, including Fletcher, died during their harsh first New England winter. Those who were left behind in the Netherlands married, bore children of their own and, like Koet's family, often gradually forgot about their forefathers who had braved the ocean in search of religious freedom.

Not that the story of the Pilgrims' Leiden years rests solely on the fickle nature of individual memory. Leiden's municipal archives, where Wassenaar did her research, house many records of the Pilgrims' stay here. And for the past four decades, since the 1957 passage of Mayflower II renewed interest in the Pilgrim story, the American community in the Netherlands has put on a Thanksgiving celebration. It now draws almost 700 people, mostly American expatriates, to the city's great Gothic Pieterskerk across the road from where the Pilgrims once worshiped.

"It's a nondenominational service," emphasizes Roberta Enschede, the driving force behind the program. "It focuses on the Pilgrim history. I tell them that John Robinson [the Pilgrims' minister] is interred somewhere beneath these ancient stones," she continues, enjoying the drama of the 15th-century setting. "That sends a shiver though them."

No one knows exactly where Robinson's remains lie. Not even Bangs, though he knows almost every meetinghouse, every marketplace and every spot where Pilgrim houses once stood. From his museum in the shadow of the 15th-century Hooglandsekerk, the church where Fletcher's grandchildren were baptized, Bangs talks about the need to preserve tangible evidence of the past in order to understand it.

That's why, he says, the emphasis of his museum "is on the objects of the time." None is labeled. Instead, the director himself gives the tour. And with his help, you begin to see yourself wielding the heavy iron utensils and swinging pots over the open fire to heat your food, then serving it on the chunky redware pottery alongside a jug of beer you fetched from the local tavern. You think what it would be like to do that by the smoky light of a fish oil lamp, with five to 10 children at your feet, playing with knucklebones, or perhaps painstakingly shaping their initials (as Bangs will invite you to do) on a slate tablet. And you try hard to imagine how you will get a good night's sleep, sitting almost upright (to prevent your internal organs from shifting) in the built-in bedstead in the corner. "Tell me when I should stop," you hear Bangs say through your reverie, as he opens yet another drawer to show glass trading beads, a louse comb, portrait medallions.

Bangs's enthusiasm is limitless, but he is well aware that not everyone shares his passions, which extend well beyond the 14-by-18-foot confines of the museum. He wants to expand his exhibits into the 15th-century house next door. He has compiled a "Pilgrim Walking Tour of Leiden." And he has become the self-appointed guardian of a couple of other vestiges of the Pilgrim era here: the ruins of the Vrouwekerk, or Church of Our Lady, where another group of religious refugees, the French-speaking Calvinists (or Walloons), worshiped and where Phillipe de la Noye (ancestor of Franklin Delano Roosevelt) was baptized; and part of St. Catherine's Hospital, where Miles Standish, who became Plymouth Colony's military leader, was apparently treated for a wound. Those sites are slated for redevelopment, the first as a public square, the second as a shopping area--and Bangs is hellbent on saving the remains.

That sticks in the craw of Alexander Pechtold, Leiden's alderman for cultural affairs.

One of the things Pechtold objects to is the way Bangs has used the Internet to rally support among historical societies in the United States. "I get e-mails from Hawaii," says Pechtold, "saying 'Aloha. What are you doing there?' People in America must think we are destroying monuments by the dozen."

He concedes that the ruin of the Vrouwekerk is a registered national monument (one of 1,300 in Leiden) but argues that while the foundations may be worthy of preservation what remains above ground is a mishmash of stones from the Middle Ages, the 17th century, the 19th century and just 20 years ago, when there was an attempt to reconstruct the one remaining wall.

"Leiden is proud of its Pilgrim heritage . . ." but it's "important to make room in the city for modern life," he says, referring to the need for a public square where people can congregate. What's more, he argues, "it's a Leiden monument," and its connection to the Pilgrims--through the Walloons--is tenuous at best. "In Leiden," he said, "nobody cares about the removal of those remains. . . . Somebody suggested I send [the wall] to the States, sell it stone by stone," he jokes.

For now, the fate of the Vrouwekerk rests with the Council of States, the final level of appeal in the Netherlands, which held a hearing on Nov. 7 and should release its decision toward the end of the year. If it allows development, Bangs will look into an appeal to the European Union.

One thing the two men agree on: The site is no beauty spot. With its graffiti and faint stench of beer and urine, the 40-foot wall attracts more homeless people than history buffs.

Bangs blames the city for the neglect, pulling out aerial photographs and pointing out other ways Leiden could make room for modern life. Yes, the Vrouwekerk was a Walloon church, but some of those religious refugees joined the Pilgrims and others became early settlers of Manhattan Island, he points out. "The wall is an important symbol of the historic cultural ties between the Netherlands and the United States," he argues.

The last Pilgrim house, which belonged to the future colony's governor, William Bradford, was torn down in 1985. The city should realize how important the remains are to those interested in the history of the Pilgrims, Bangs says. The e-mails that arrive on Pechtold's computer screen are evidence of that. "He's a politician," Bangs says, and should "be happy to hear what the public thinks."

Bangs's e-mail campaign may already be helping to save the St. Catherine's hospital site. Bangs asked Internet surfers to write to Hans Gobes, senior vice president of the Dutch food company Ahold (which owns the supermarket chain Albert Heijn here as well as Giant and Stop & Shop in the United States). Gobes says his company will not participate in the new shopping area "if it would jeopardize the Pilgrims' monuments." He believes it would be "rather simple" to redevelop the area in a way that leaves them intact. Pechtold now says it is "quite possible the hospital wall will remain."

As Bangs takes on the city in its process of modernization, he recalls another time when the Pilgrims found themselves at odds with their adopted home. A decade after their arrival here, a sudden crackdown on religious dissent, as well as the enduring hardships of working in the city's clothmaking industry, drove the Pilgrims back to England, where they then set sail for America. But according to the writings of Bradford, the Pilgrims also worried--quite presciently, as Koet's story shows--that their children would assimilate and become Dutch. And benefit though they did initially from Leiden's spirit of tolerance, the Pilgrims didn't approve of the Dutch reluctance to observe the Sabbath strictly.

But Bradford would never have guessed the role that a Dutch descendant of one of his fellow passengers has played in keeping Pilgrim history alive in Leiden. For in his efforts to re-create the Pilgrims' domestic history in Leiden, Bangs has found a surprising resource. David Koet has no trouble imagining what Moses Fletcher's family life must have been like here four centuries ago. It would have been very similar to his own.

The 10th of 11 children, Koet grew up in a 17th-century weaver's house in Leiden and so feels quite at home in Bangs's tiny museum. His father was a bricklayer, and his mother raised the children, cooked and kept house. "She couldn't do it all herself," Koet remembers, so all the children helped out with the chores. Was it a hard life? "Oh, no, no, no!" he declares with sudden emphasis, gazing through the half-light in the museum as if he can picture his siblings there now, "lined up like organ pipes." No, as the youngest boy, Koet remembers being spoiled. "It was a life of harmony," he recalls.

Harmony is not the first word that comes to mind as Bangs fights to rescue the remnants of the Pilgrims' years here. Ironically, not many of the Americans who gather here today have been following the fate of the sites. "Nobody knows a lot about it," says Enschede, the Thanksgiving service organizer. "It's been mostly in the Dutch papers." But Bangs hopes that by next year, when he again greets the children dressed as Pilgrims and watches the presentation of the flags, he will have something more to give thanks for.

© 2000 The Washington Post Company