The Lost Poems of Jacob Steendam D. L. Noorlander (bio) Jacob Steendam did not enjoy great advantages in life. Born in Germany, he moved to the Netherlands as a young man and mostly remained on the fringes of Dutch society, working in lowly positions his entire career. Perhaps in part because of the handicap or "deformity" of his feet, he never led men in battle, never served as governor or burgomaster, never served on any colonial council. Though he dabbled in trade, his skills and connections were insufficient to win much wealth or attention. Yet most students of New Netherland have at least heard his name because he wrote poetry, including a few poems about the colony that was his home from 1652 to late 1660 or early 1661. Most famously, he tried to entice other potential immigrants with his "Praise of New Netherland," published in Amsterdam after he left America.1 Steendam might have been happy to hear that at different times in the future he would be called "the first poet in New Netherland," "first poet of New York," and "first poet of the United States."2 But he would have also been confused, because he could not have located two of those three place-names on any map available at the time. He was certainly not a New Yorker, nor was he an American, strictly speaking. Rather, he was a Germano-Dutch [End Page 75] traveler, and over the course of his life he lived in Europe, Africa, America, and Asia. Ironically, the man who is mostly known today for his American poetry wrote far more about each of those other places. Compared against his three New Netherland poems, he wrote at least thirty-five poems about West Africa and the people he had known during his eight years as lay preacher on the Gold Coast, and at the end of his life he published a whole book of poems for the youth of Batavia in the Dutch East Indies. Many of the Batavian poems were on broad, universal topics like love and courage, but again, as he had done with America and Africa before, he also included poems about specific people, places, and events from his time in the East. In total, Steendam published at least 236 poems and a few short works in prose.3 The "Lost Poems" of this essay's title do not refer to Steendam's African and Asian poetry. Dutch historians are already aware of both, and even if they haven't done much with them, they have sometimes mentioned them or examined limited, individual poems in writing about New Netherland or the Dutch Atlantic.4 By "Lost Poems" I am referring to four poems written in New Netherland (or in one case about New Netherland) that Steendam published in his Asian collection in the 1670s, much later than his three better-known New Netherland poems. In general, historians must use poetry with caution, of course, because any particular work might reflect the views of some nebulous, unnamed narrator, not necessarily the author. As Joanne van der Woude and Jaap Jacobs learned in studying Petrus Stuyvesant's unpublished poems, early modern writers also sometimes chose not to engage with their colonial surroundings or provide concrete historical, biographical details about their lives. But in Stuyvesant's poetical exchanges with Johan Farret, a Dutch official at Curaçao, van der Woude and Jacobs did still find subjects of great value. They could at least identify and analyze Atlantic friendship networks, spheres of influence, "male affect," and imperial ambition. Historians and literary scholars can both do more to include these kinds of sources in the corpus of colonial and early American literature.5 Because Steendam, unlike Stuyvesant, wrote about real places and moments, his poems are a useful window on his life and travels, as well as the ideas and culture of his time. So committed was he to the strengths and possibilities of poetry, he sometimes wrote even his correspondence in verse, using rhyming couplets, for example, to share with friends the details of a recent voyage or his initial impressions of a new and unfamiliar land.6 When [End Page 76] the...