Catalyntje Trico: A Life in New Amsterdam
Reviewed by Esme E. Berg
In Catalyntje Trico: A Life in New Amsterdam, author Lana Holden offers us a vivid re-creation of life in New Amsterdam and New Netherland in the 17th Century. This book is carefully and extensively researched and includes many of the major events that occurred during Catalyntie’s long lifetime. We follow her from 1623 when she leaves Amsterdam, until her death in 1689. “She was the only European who lived in this settlement from the first day colonists stepped off the ship until the English took over forty years later,” the author writes in her preface.
As a young girl in Hainaut, Catalyntje leaves her home and family with her young sister to escape religious persecution. They make their way to Amsterdam where they live comfortably for a short period of time with their half-sister Marie, until Catalyntje meets the love of her life, Joris. The two marry and decide to accept the invitation of the Dutch West India Company to go to the Dutch Colony in the New World, called New Netherland. It is the year 1624 and Catalyntje is 18 years old. When they finally arrive, the young couple is separated from the friends they made on the voyage and sent to the rough wilderness near Fort Orange. Here they begin a new life for themselves, building their own house from trees cut down by themselves, beginning a garden with the seeds that Catalyntje brought with her, and having their first child with no one to help.
No sooner are they settled than officials of the Company declare the area is no longer considered safe and they are forced to move south to New Amsterdam and start again.
Arriving in New Amsterdam, Catalyntje is bereft to discover that the dear friend that she had made on the ship has died. Although lonely for her friends and family left in Europe, Catalyntje and Joris bravely work with courage and determination to create a new life in a wild and difficult land. Braving harsh weather and other adverse forces, they build another new home on Pearl Street, and gradually prosper while raising eleven children. Thanks to their simple and accepting ways, their relations with the native peoples are friendly and beneficial to all–until things change drastically as a result of various wars and ultimately the British take-over in 1664.
Following the couple year by year from youth to middle and then to old age, Lana Holden draws us into the life and times of what New York was like at its earliest beginnings. This novel portrays the life of a strong woman about whom the author writes, “over four hundred years ago, an incredibly strong-willed and kind woman worked, loved, and lived in the Dutch Colony of New Netherland. Catalyntje’s life happened at a different time and place from mine, but I feel connected to her as a woman, striving to help those around me and to positively impact the people I meet each day.”
Available here on Amazon.
